Dallin Bills

Today's Boring Biz: Pool Leak Detection Company - $2.3M Revenue - $610K Cashflow - South Carolina - Day 39 of "50 States In 50 Days" Note: We do not represent this deal, highlighting for informational purposes only for viewers What do they do? 1. Leak detection services 2. Electronic detection equipment 3. Pool inspections Investment Highlights 1. Strong market demand 2. Established reputation 3. Business systems in place Investment risks/concerns 1. What is the competition 2. Customer concentration 3. Length of contracts #SMB #ETA #finance #Cashflow #investing #search #searchfund #privateequity #microprivateequity #smallbusiness #venturecapital #vc #entrepreneur #business #businessowner #pool #leakdetection #southcarolina #servicecompany Disclaimer: Hypothetical and illustrative only. Please do your own research (DYOR) or work with tax and legal professionals before making a decision. This video are intended for informational purposes only and does not constitute legal or tax advice, nor should be construed as an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy, or a recommendation for any security by SMB PE LLC or any third party

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Calling all VC / PE / Angel Groups... 👀 I'm working on some game-changing win-win-win offerings for the VC, PE, and Angel groups around Utah and beyond From bootstrap basics to pre-seed and Series A acceleration, companies at different stages have unique branding and online presence needs Whether it's building brand assets, refining pitch decks, or rolling out custom solutions, the goal is to elevate startups (and their investors) to better positioning and longer-term success Collaboration and innovation are at the core of these initiatives, and I can't wait to see the impact! Who do you know that should hear about this? #VentureCapital #PrivateEquity #AngelInvestors #StartupGrowth #Innovation #BusinessStrategy #Entrepreneurship #Branding #Webdesign

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Reality Engagement —— I started PHX Ventures because I want to help founders in Arizona build high-growth software companies that achieve venture scale. I can handle the good, bad, and ugly of company building. I’ve lived it. I can handle losing money. I don’t like it, but I can handle it. I can handle bad news and disappointment. Company building is a roller coaster. I can handle a changing market and new competitors. Market opportunity and market dynamism go hand in hand. I can handle co-founder breakups and key team member departures. It’s not great but it’s fairly normal. I can handle bad quarters and product problems. Stuff happens in startups. What I can’t handle is a lack of engagement with reality. Willful ignorance or disregard for data won’t make your business better. If the math of your business is telling you something is broken then it means something is broken. Let’s just fix it. And let’s fix it right now. Let's at least try. I love optimism. But I love realism even more. Broken things tend not to fix themselves. In my experience, the best founders have the highest engagement with reality. Just tell me what about your current reality is giving you angst. Tell me the problems in the business. Just tell me. Don’t sell me. Tell me. I can handle it. And maybe I can help. #founders #startups #b2b #saas

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One realization we've made at Convoi is if we hear something 50+ times we need to build it for the Utah Startup Community. We've built three things so far, and just about to launch number 4 in a couple of weeks. First, we started Convoi Ventures to bring more capital to the earliest stage of startups. ~2.5 years in, we've backed 40 companies, 2/3 that are pre-revenue and 50% are first-time founders. Second, we started Utah Tech Week to create a grassroots event that will be forever focused on Utah and it's early stage startup community. The first year there was 114 events, and this past January, there were 197 events and 15k attendees. Third, we started a program for early stage founders that we think is going to be the flagship program for early stage founders in Utah. Our alpha program was a big success, and beta this summer will be even better. We'll announce after we're out of beta. :) Fourth, we constantly hear of folks at the largest companies we have in Utah that want to support our early stage startups. We're going to be pretty quiet about this one #IYKYK, but if you're a VP or above at a tech company (public, or Utah based series A/B) company, please DM if you'd like more details. Thank you for letting me interrupt my social media fast for this post. Back in my cave for a couple of months.

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We recently had an opportunity to gather with finance leaders based in Utah, all the way from public company CFOs to finance leaders of fast growing Series A-stage startups. It was a great discussion with a great group. A couple things stood out for me from the discussion: 🤖 A handful of these leaders mentioned that they are starting to see some tangible productivity gains from the AI in their organizations, mainly around developer productivity and getting more done with less. It still felt early, but interesting to hear anecdotes of the promise of AI being realized. ✂️ On behalf of our portfolio companies, we asked what it takes takes to sell software into their organizations given the current economic environment. Their feedback confirmed a lot of what we were hearing from our B2B portfolio companies: ▪️They are looking to consolidate vendors, it's very unlikely (if not impossible) they would approve a net new vendor unless it is replacing another tool/service they can cut from the budget ▪️ROI is extremely important. They are looking for tangible evidence that the tool will drive revenue and/or reduce costs. ▪️The mentality of "everyone gets a seat" is over. They are looking for justification for why certain teams and individuals should get a license. ▪️ They are approving every purchase. Just assume the CFO is a part of the buying committee even if it isn't obvious. Bring the CFO in early to the buying process and arm the internal champion with the ROI case along the way. Really grateful for this group for gathering and sharing their insights!

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Any business worth acquiring is like a puzzle with pieces that fit just right. Picture this: a 40-year-old electrical services business with $2.8 million in revenue, $600k in SDE, and a purchase price of only $1.75 million. Add in FF&E assets worth over $900k and a modest down payment of $175k, and you’ve got a compelling investment. With 14 employees and a solid asset base, this business checks all the boxes for a strategic acquisition. As always, thorough due diligence is a must, but don’t let skepticism hold you back from a transformative opportunity. This could be your ticket to exponential growth. But how do you source deals like these? If you’re ready to dive in deeper, go to: https://lnkd.in/gZxZeaR6 to join my recently launched community: The Acquisitions Accelerator. See you there. #BusinessAcquisition #InvestmentStrategy #EntrepreneurLife #BusinessGrowth #MergersAndAcquisitions

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A birthday ode to my partner Scott Paul, Utah startup scene's court jester. Scott's been one of my closest friends for over a decade. Scott is simply the most unique person we have in our ecosystem. My favorite way that I've had him explained is "you can't describe Scott, you have to experience him". Scott's a weird human and that's my highest compliment. People who aren't outliers are dull to me. That's why I've chosen to spend my career around crazy founders and big dreamers. Scott centers his life around the next novelty and experience. His favorite kind of novelty is learning about the humans of this earth, how they tick, and what makes them who they are. This is his endless and tireless search, and when he finds ones whose energy and ambition are inspiring to him, he backs them. Prior to us starting Convoi, he did that with his own money as an angel investor 70 times. He did it as an advisor, formally and informally probably thousands of times. I was on a call with a founder of a series A Utah startup and he told me that he and his co-founder connected because of a Scott Paul LinkedIn post. Scott, of course, was the first angel check. Scott is one of the greatest sources for good in our ecosystem. He's countless people's First Believer. He was my first angel check on my first business and in many times of my life, my first believer. One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is to write off Scott as just a wig wearing, inappropriate email sending, get kicked off LinkedIn-ing dude. He's truly one of the most selfless people that gets his greatest pleasure from helping others succeed. I'm sure there are many that will see this that can say they owe a large part of their career to Scott. Scott's one of the best we have in Utah. In a outlier business, there's no greater advantage than having the ultimate outlier as your partner. Love ya, Scotty P. Love building with you.

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"Hey Jeff, you said that convertible notes are VC qualified investments, but do you still invest in them knowing that they will not convert into equity, basically doing a straight debt deal?" Sure. If the interest rate and timeframe is favorable, say 20% for 3 years with a $500k investment, I'd take that seriously for the right company. If they're focus is generating revenue and working towards profitability then it makes sense, but if they're focused on growth which will require multiple rounds of capital, I'd want to convert If I could turn $500k into $800k in 3 years, that's a win in my book. I can then take the rest of the fund and put it into more risky investments.

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Toby Z. Rice, EQT Corporation and the Rice family are bona fide American heroes. They are a national treasure, steering the fight not only for abundant affordable energy for Americans, but American energy independence and economic dominance around the world. The facts are simple: The vast majority of the world still depends on oil and coal. LNG is simply the largest, most actionable, and most economic tool for decarbonization humanity has ready at their disposal today. Period. Let us unleash it. Halting LNG is simply unpatriotic. Worried about the plight of developing nations? Trust me as someone whose family originated from Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations historically speaking, more lives and economies are at risk when nations are energy insecure. Hard to live, cook, have air conditioning, run businesses, run factories and enable a national workforce to thrive when you don’t have energy, and power goes out multiple times a day.. And when LNG is unleashed, America becomes more secure thanks to the stronger relations it creates with other nations. Proud to have the Rice family as a partner and frequent collaborator at 8090 Industries. Inspiring words from Toby Z. Rice himself: “We're not fighting for our business. We're not fighting for pipelines. We're not fighting for LNG. We're fighting for our customers, which is you. All of you. We're fighting for America because energy is everything.” Cc Ryan Rice Danny Rice Kerem Ozmen Wes Mendenhall Filip Vurdelja Haluk Sabanci Dincer Grant Brown Ishan Meswani Garuth A. Andrew Irwin Shilpa Patel

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Is it really worth it? Do you even care? The "CAC" customer acquisition costs for a crowdfunding round via REG CF or 506c... It's a number that you get data on as there's years of of it to get a good "par" value of what it will cost to "acquire" an investor lead based on investment amounts and then what the costs are to convert that investor to a signed allocation contract. For instance, in real estate I know that a buyer lead costs $600 and then another $400-800 to convert that lead into a sale, so $1,400 total. If I can earn a $5,000 commission on that lead then it's totally worth it as that's a huge ROI, even it took 6 months in total. Let's say that you're doing a 506c raise and the average CAC for a $10k investor lead is $1,500 bucks plus another $1,500 to convert that lead with a 3 month average sales cycle. You NET $7k based on those numbers, but unlike generating leads for other industries, securities have other upfront costs that need to be factored into the whole raise. So, if it costs you $50k to set up your raise, then you need to include that in your CAC which you can obviously break up over the whole cap table. Now your NET CAC went from $7k to let's say $6k. You spend $4k to get $6k, is that worth it? I think so, but I look at it as an ROI and not as an expense, even though that's exactly what it is. To each their own of course! ***The numbers above are just for reference purposes and are not factual.

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Any Operating Partner with a portco (or PE-backed teams) with marketing programs running and questioning efficiencies? I'd be willing to take a look and provide you a high level group of questions to provide those vendors or challenge the portfolio company to get the most out of the investments. Process: - DM with Portco name and URL - I'll gather as much as I can without awareness of the Portco or Vendor - We schedule a call next week to walk through findings - I'll write a full email you can use to send around in an attempt to level up the approach or poke holes through narratives Sometimes it's great to get a 3rd party neutral view - so #privateequity reach out!

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I just had a fun call with Peter Walker. He's going to join the event we're hosting next week covering the SEED CRUST — the state of the #Seed market. Some interesting data points on Seed & Pre-Seed Quarterly Deal Values from PitchBook: 2014-2017: $1.4B 2018-2020: $2.2B 2021-2022: $5.4B 2023-2024: $3.6B (through Q1) One of these things does not look like the other. One of the key messages that Peter and I talked about today—and will probably really hammer on next week—is this: ▶ 2021 was an anomaly ◀ And anomalies can lead to anomalous thinking. What's happening in the market is only the backdrop. You need to be aware of the market conditions. But the most important part is how you run your #startup. Join us on Thursday May 2nd @ 1pm ET // 10am PT for the full report, analysis and insights. https://lnkd.in/g9FyiEps #startups #fundraising #founders #venturecapital

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Well-written and sourced article describing what's going in seed-stage venture market. At 9point8 Collective we tend to orbit the seed-stage (both ideating and developing companies to reach seed and helping post-seed companies refactor and scale in anticipation of A) and for many companies it's a critical inflection point which determines their long term success or failure. The main takeaways I was able to gather: 1️⃣ Many startups that raised seed rounds in 2021-2022 are struggling to secure Series A funding due to tighter market conditions and increased investor expectations. 2️⃣ Seed investors are becoming more cautious, leading to longer diligence processes and a preference for startups with strong traction or experienced founders. As a result, valuations have stayed relatively high even as deal flow reduces. 3️⃣ Startups are adopting various strategies to navigate this challenging environment, including cutting costs, raising bridge rounds or convertible notes, and M&A/acqui-hires. 4️⃣ Despite the challenges, there are opportunities for both startups and investors in this new landscape, particularly for those who can adapt to the changing market conditions. Investors are accumulating dry powder -- and with rates on the decline -- will be looking to deploy into companies with stronger fundamentals than their 2021-2022 counterparts.

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Having a Cars and Capital event tomorrow in Southern California with Oren Klaff. If you want to join message me. https://lnkd.in/gDQ4D39u Oren Klaff Bridger Pennington #InvestorEvent #FamilyOffice #InvestmentOpportunity #CarlsbadEvent #PrivateEquity #WealthManagement #InvestmentConference #CapitalRaising #NetworkingEvent #IndustryLeaders #FinancialGrowth #InvestorsMeetup #WealthBuilding #BusinessGrowth #InvestmentForum

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It is a great privledge to be backing Stella Garber for a second time, as well as her sensational co-founders Brian Schmidt and Justin Gallagher. It’s also great to working with Index Ventures again, too. One thing I have learned in my venture career is that humans are lazy, and software that does simple things can feel like magic. Hoop uses AI to automatically harvest to do items from all of your communication channels. Today it’s single player, and in the future it will be your whole team. Read more about why we invested: https://lnkd.in/geTy-kyZ

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Go FutureMoney go!

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Joe Mastrangelo has more than 30 years experience across a wide range of energy technologies so he knows what's needed for the transition to cleaner, more reliable energy sources. At startup Eos, he's leading a team that is building batteries that perform in the harshest conditions. Joe also discussed how Eos brought manufacturing back to the U.S. and built a supply chain that 94 percent in the U.S. He also talks about the biggest mistake he made regarding his career. What did he learn? "What you're trying to do is build up this base of experience that allows you to make better decisions as you grow your career." Watch the interview at: https://lnkd.in/eYBUGjbW

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