Podcast: Jake Cervilla & Interland Design

From SMEVentures, it’s the Search Fund Podcast, a show about hungry entrepreneurs who, instead of starting a business, decide to buy one. These are their stories of success, failure, and the lessons they’ve learned.

Jake Cervilla wanted to be a business owner since age 12. Now he is owner and CEO of Interland Design. In this episode, Jake remembers the business owners he looked up to throughout his career before making an acquisition only months before the COVID lockdown. Reflecting on entrepreneurial dreams, he says that being a business owner is harder than he expected, but that he wouldn't have it any other way.

Jake Cervilla: But there’s things you don’t expect when you take on a company, like I did not expect to have to talk employees through losing family members, stuff completely outside of work and business, just had no expectation of having to be also that on top of being a boss and a manager and trying to walk that fine line of humanity and work.

(intro)

From SMEVentures, it’s The Search Fund Podcast, a show about hungry entrepreneurs who, instead of starting a business, decide to buy one. These are their stories of success, failure, and the lessons they’ve learned.

Jake Nicholson: This is Jake Nicholson of SMEVentures and, on today’s show, we’re joined by Jake Cervilla, ETA entrepreneur and CEO of Interland Design. Jake was exposed to entrepreneurship early in his life through family friends who ran successful businesses. Their stories excited him, and Jake’s consulting experience then taught him a great deal about himself and reinforced his desire to be a business owner himself one day. In this episode, Jake discusses how his search unfolded and concluded in just a matter of months and how he led his new company in the throes of a global pandemic. Jake is also refreshingly candid about the challenges he faced as a first-time CEO.

(interview)

Jake Nicholson: Jake, thank you so much for joining the show today. Really excited to talk to you. I know you’ve had quite an interesting few years and I think your story will be appreciated by our listeners.

Jake Cervilla: Thanks for having me on, Jake. I really appreciate it. Looking forward to it.

Jake Nicholson: All right, Jake. Yeah, let’s start with the beginning. Tell me about your upbringing. Where are you from?

Jake Cervilla: Oh, so I grew up in central Virginia, outside of Richmond, all the way through high school there before going to the University of Virginia for my undergrad in Charlottesville.

Jake Nicholson: Okay, so tell me about sort of the place where you grew up. Was it an idyllic suburban neighborhood or not?

Jake Cervilla: A bit of the nice suburban neighborhood. I was very lucky where I grew up. I had a single mother but we were in a good neighborhood and I was able to play all the sports I wanted, it was safe, I had friends around, so it was — she did a very good job for me.

Jake Nicholson: I’m sure she’d love to hear that. What were you like as a kid?

Jake Cervilla: Busy. I spent as much time in sports as possible until I had to narrow down which ones I was playing, but I played as many as I could and then in the summers, I spent as much time on the water with my grandfather as I could. So a lot of time fishing.

Jake Nicholson: What sports did you play?

Jake Cervilla: I played soccer was my main one and that’s what I kept up and still play regularly, but I played soccer, baseball, and basketball.

Jake Nicholson: All around good American boy.

Jake Cervilla: Pretty much.

Jake Nicholson: And spending time on the water, what did that look like?

Jake Cervilla: My grandfather lived on the Chesapeake Bay, my grandfather and grandmother, and we’d go down there, spend a lot of the summer down there with them, and that was a mix of doing work around their home for them, the typical chores, whatever it was, and then just going fishing with them or kayaking. I pretty much got a love for saltwater when I was there, and all the seafood that comes with it.

Jake Nicholson: With all that time spent on sports, were you equally devoted to school?

Jake Cervilla: I was. So pretty much that was what took up the vast majority of my life during the school year was sports in school, I’d come home, do my homework, go to practice, and most of my friends were through school or sports so I got to see them as well. It worked out pretty well. But I was always pretty driven and my mom was pretty supportive of that so that helped.

Jake Nicholson: What subjects drew your interest the most?

Jake Cervilla: When I was a kid, it was all math and science. I was pretty directed towards there. As I got older, I started enjoying English and literature a lot more. But science really did draw me in and still on the more amateur side, I still love biology and how all that works.

Jake Nicholson: What’s your favorite English literature book from your early years?

Jake Cervilla: Oh, gosh. Either if we go way early, it’s got to be Old Man of the Sea. Yeah, I’m going to stick with that one.

Jake Nicholson: Right, that’s a good one. Well —

Jake Cervilla: Good classic.

Jake Nicholson: Fits with the love for saltwater.

Jake Cervilla: Exactly. Exactly.

Jake Nicholson: What fueled your childhood dreams? When you were 10, 12, 13 years old, what did you think life had in store for you?

Jake Cervilla: It was pretty focused on education as I was growing up. It was pretty important to my family. The way they presented it to me was very positive so I always thought I was going to go to school, probably do something advanced. At that age, I was leaning more towards a scientific profession, like a biologist or fisheries or something like that. But around that 12, 13, 14, I started transitioning more towards some kind of business owner because of the people I was around. So my father passed away when I was pretty young but I was really close with a lot of our family friends and a lot them had been successful and quite a few of them owned their own businesses and that’s really where that want started, was seeing their success, their happiness, and, at the very beginning, was being able to go fishing on their boats with them, spending time around them. Good influences.

Jake Nicholson: If you don’t mind me asking, what industry were your parents in?

Jake Cervilla: Oh, my mom was an accountant. She did controller for property management companies but she had that background in accounting and, in her retirement years, she was a bookkeeper for seven or eight small businesses on an hourly basis for them, because they wouldn’t usually be able to afford somebody of her caliber so they would hire her out for one day a week or something like that. And my dad was in property management as well, more on the operation side.

Jake Nicholson: So you started thinking about becoming a business owner someday when you were entering your teenage years. What fueled that thought? And did you act on it at all? Did you open a lemonade stand or start anything during that time?

Jake Cervilla: So a lot of it was just the people I got to know, mostly through my grandfather, and through being on the water with them. I saw their lives that they seemed to enjoy it, they had the things they wanted, and there was an actual pride in what they did, compared to some of my other friends’ parents who didn’t necessarily have that pride in what they did. And so I did act on it a little bit. I started selling bait, catching bait, trying to do that during the summers. Then I started mowing lawn and doing yard work because I was in good shape and I could do a lot of it. So, each spring, I would spend that whole time getting people’s yards ready for mulch, whatever labor was needed, and that’s how I got my cash in high school and going into college.

Jake Nicholson: You answered my next question, which was whether you had any side jobs in high school, was primarily mowing lawns?

Jake Cervilla: Whatever was needed. So I mowed lawns, I pressure washed, I did a lot of mulch. The suburban area was a lot of pretty flower beds and stuff like that and a lot of people didn’t want to deal with the mulching side of it, they just wanted to plant the pretty stuff so I did the dirty work.

Jake Nicholson: You went to University of Virginia.

Jake Cervilla: I did.

Jake Nicholson: Prestigious, beautiful school, and studied economics and psychology. I did a liberal arts program as well. My studies were more in the literature and languages. But my econ friends told me that econ studies in a liberal arts context were quite academic and theoretical as well. Was this true for you or did you feel like you gained practical knowledge from those undergrad years?

Jake Cervilla: It was very theoretical, especially in the beginning, because typical economics was basing around people making rational decisions and we all know people don’t. But once you got into the 400 level classes, your last year, that’s where my two majors really started to tie in. You got some of the social psychology and why people make the decisions they do and how that’s applied in behavioral finance and stuff like that. So that was pretty fun. But there was a lot of theory but it helped me at least get a basis for how I viewed things.

Jake Nicholson: Was that you’re plan from the beginning when you chose economics and psychology to tie them in together or did you have separate ambitions for each?

Jake Cervilla: I was pretty much focused on the econ and I started taking psychology classes because I enjoyed it. And then, as I started progressing in psychology, I started seeing the ties and got more aggressive with it and decided to get the major. So it wasn’t my initial plan, I was just taking it because I enjoyed it.

Jake Nicholson: Did you enjoy university in general?

Jake Cervilla: Oh, yes. Probably more than I should have. But it was a great four years, I loved it. I still love going back.

Jake Nicholson: The academics or the frat party?

Jake Cervilla: Both.

Jake Nicholson: So you graduate UVA, degree in economics and psychology, then you work for about six years before your MBA so let’s go through that a little bit. Your first job you took as a financial advisor, why?

Jake Cervilla: That was — the opportunity looked good and it had some of the aspects of, or at least it was pitched as the it is what you make of it so self-starting, kind of that business owner feel. And what it came down to is it was a lot of sales. I managed a lot of portfolios but there was a lot of sales on top of it and I learned a lot from that, part of it realizing that pure sales wasn’t my cup of tea but I did learn quite a bit from that experience before switching jobs.

Jake Nicholson: What did you learn, besides that sales wasn’t your cup of tea?

Jake Cervilla: That was the big one. But, no, I got a good basis for how to manage my own money going forward. I got a good basis for things being hard and just gutting through them. Cold calls are brutal but if you can sit there and do a hundred in a day, you can do many, many other things that are a lot easier than that. And it just taught me that grinding aspect that sometimes you need, which was very useful during the search phase of search funds.

Jake Nicholson: Who were your clients?

Jake Cervilla: Normally high-wealth individuals and I tended to focus towards business owners, helping them with their retirement plans, buy-sell agreements, and the insurance involved in that so I tried to be kind of one stop.

Jake Nicholson: I’m speculating a bit here, but did that also fuel an interest in becoming a business owner yourself?

Jake Cervilla: Very much. The more time I spent around owners, the more I wanted to be one. And that was also part of the reason I left that side, or left that industry.

Jake Nicholson: Did you love the job while you were there?

Jake Cervilla: The wins made you really high, but on the day to day, no, and that’s why I started searching for a new one.

Jake Nicholson: So you were there for only about a year, a little bit more, and then you moved to Universal Consulting and did stay there for about five years before moving on to your MBA. Can you give us an idea of what kinds of projects you worked on there?

Jake Cervilla: Yeah, that was actually — that was a great experience and really helped me grow professionally. So I worked mostly on Department of Defense projects with the military medicine side, operations, strategies, supply chain. For a little while I was more of a firefighter-style consultant. I took over a couple projects in succession when somebody had left or moved or gotten another job and left abruptly and I had to go in and figure it out, stabilize it, and then I would usually pass it on to a team before I moved on to the next one and it got me very comfortable going into situations where I wouldn’t have all the information and to just try to learn what was going on and figure out a solution to whatever problem there was. And that could range from anything to supply chain which is completely messed up to, oh, the client was just a little unnerved because they lost their consultant and needs to be shown that we’re still going to provide everything they need. So I got a lot of face-to-face client services practice and just general management of situations.

Jake Nicholson: Did you have an opportunity, were you mostly Excel and PowerPoint or did you have an opportunity to roll your sleeves up?

Jake Cervilla: Yes, roll my sleeves up. I was given control of a couple departments at different times for hiring and re-changing their supply chain but there was a lot of Excel and PowerPoint. But some of it was stuff I would build on Excel and then sell to them as — one of the things we did was a manpower calculator. Basically, you got your budget, how many people you have, what you can apply those to, and what you’re getting for those hours. That’s about as much as I can say on that one.

Jake Nicholson: Sure. Can you tell us about a particular project you worked on, perhaps something that you learned the most from or one that stands out in your memory?

Jake Cervilla: Yes. For the Navy, I was working on one where they just had a broken supply chain for safety equipment at different shipyards across the world and what we did was bring that into a centralized bit in our office and run everything through there so there was standardization of safety equipment being used at every one of the bases, every one of the shipyards, and you could order in bulk and ship it out through DC and it just streamlined the whole thing. But getting 35 shipyards on board with that across the entire world was a giant challenge with a lot of pushback. But, in the end, it saved them a lot of money. And that was my job.

Jake Nicholson: Did you enjoy being a consultant?

Jake Cervilla: I did. I did. The five years I did it, I kept learning and I loved it, and that project I just spoke about, that was one piece of that one. That group was amazing to work with. They wrote every one of my business school recommendation letters and I learned a ton from them. So that was very influential.

Jake Nicholson: Speaking of business school, you decided to go to Carnegie Mellon, which is quite an entrepreneurial school with the reputation to match. Did you think you wanted to do something entrepreneurial right after or did you have — what were your plans going into your MBA?

Jake Cervilla: I wanted to go on the entrepreneurship route. That was my first choice. The second choice was leverage my consulting background. I still had a bunch of contacts in DC, if I had decided to go back to that route, but I really did want to throw myself into the entrepreneurship scene at Tepper and that was part of the reason I chose that school. Actually, probably the largest reason I chose that school.

Jake Nicholson: What did the entrepreneurship path look like when you started your MBA?

Jake Cervilla: At that point, it was the typical startup, what you hear about starting your own company from scratch and growing it from there into something you’re proud of and it sustains you and that was the typical entrepreneur ideal you hear about. So when I went in, that’s exactly what I looked at. I’ve heard of acquisitions but I didn’t have a trust fund so I didn’t think I could go out and buy a company. And then, as we all know, there’s a lot of different options to acquire a company and I got introduced to search partway into Tepper.

Jake Nicholson: Take me through that lightbulb moment where you realized that buying a company was actually feasible for you.

Jake Cervilla: Oh, the first one was talking to the guy who was a board member on the Entrepreneurship Club a year ahead of me and he ran the entrepreneurship through acquisition side of the club and we sat down for a beer and started talking about it because I was active in the club and he kind of explained it to me and convinced me to take the first class was entrepreneurial alternatives and then apply as an internship to Generational Transfer Entrepreneurs, which was in Pittsburgh, a group of searchers that were looking for interns. And after about a week with talking to them, it popped in my head that this is exactly what I want to look for and it fit with my consulting background of going into projects and figuring out what’s going on and then guiding them through.

Jake Nicholson: Just briefly, can we touch on that internship experience? I hear from a lot of prospective searchers either in or wanting to do internships with search funds and they’re debating whether to intern at an actively searching search fund or with a searcher who’s already acquired something. Can you tell me about what you learned and whether you would have approached that internship any differently?

Jake Cervilla: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things — I’ve gotten that question from quite a few people because it is in my background, and one of the things I’ve told every one of them is make sure you’re in the right vibe with the person or group that you’re searching with. I got to meet all the searchers before I took the internship and I realized that I had a lot in common with them and there were people I respected and wanted to learn from and thought I could learn from. So that’s a big thing is just getting to know the person you’d be working with there. But that piece, that internship probably was one of the most influential pieces for my search. I got to work on closing a deal and then the start of the next searcher’s search so I got both ends of it. And then I regularly talked to the searchers who were about midway through their search, approaching LOI, stuff like that. So I really got to see firsthand every — not every stage but pretty much every stage of a search, the ups and downs, the LOIs falling through, the LOIs getting accepted, an actual acquisition, so that really showed me what I was getting into as well as I could without doing it myself, if that makes any sense.

Jake Nicholson: Sounds like it sort of rounded out your experience and perspective. You had some sales grind experience, you had some operational consulting experience, and, through this, you got to actually see a transaction.

Jake Cervilla: Exactly.

Jake Nicholson: So right to the punchline, you launched Blacktail Capital, your search, I guess before finishing your MBA, and then I think that was February of 2019, according to LinkedIn, and then you bought a company seven months later?

Jake Cervilla: Yes, I did.

Jake Nicholson: Which is very quick. How did that happen? Did you have a specific industry or lead in mind when you started?

Jake Cervilla: Part of it is luck. I had, since I was a self-funded searcher, I was able to apply my capstone project to starting the actual search phase so I did the entrepreneurship through acquisition track at Tepper which culminates in your capstone, which, if you’re a funded searcher, that is going out to try to get your funding for your search phase. If you’re self-funded, it’s let’s start going and let’s start trying to find a company while you have all the support of professors, you can ask questions of other searchers sitting around you in the Entrepreneurship Center, so really being able to tap into all of those people around me was huge and I was able to really focus on it. But really, I was only geographically focused. My wife had taken a job in the Seattle area so we decided we wanted to go there so I really only wanted to constrain myself geographically and not through anything else, because I didn’t want to reduce the pool anymore. And for the first few months, I focused on a brokered search, contacting brokers out in the Northwest and really working through them, because I expected the search to take longer and I would do the direct outreach once I was already living in Seattle, because, at the time, I was finishing my MBA, my wife was in a different city, and then I was searching in a city across the country, so I based my search out of Tepper but most of it was based out of a 50-liter backpack and airplanes and trains. It was a busy few months there but managed to sign an LOI on my graduation day.

Jake Nicholson: And you bought Interland Design.

Jake Cervilla: Interland Design.

Jake Nicholson: What does Interland Design do?

Jake Cervilla: It’s a commercial painting company with a focus on multiple arms, but the two biggest are apartment turnover, painting units in between tenants, and then I have an arm focused on high-end residential. There’s a lot of really nice, beautiful homes in Seattle with some very detailed aspects need a high-end painting company. So we try to focus on those two things.

Jake Nicholson: How big was the company when you bought it?

Jake Cervilla: Nineteen employees.

Jake Nicholson: Nineteen employees, and you bought six months, approximately, before the COVID shutdown a painting business which, I mean, we can get into the characteristics of the business industry but I imagine that should have had a material impact on your business. Can you walk us through that supply chain, employees, clients?

Jake Cervilla: All of it. If everybody could see me, they’d see I have a little bit less hair than I did before then. But, yeah, the shutdown, we saw some of that coming, writing was on the wall the couple weeks beforehand so I tried to do as much prep as I could to take care of my employees and I managed to keep everybody paid but, yeah, we shut down hard for eight weeks, no operations whatsoever, and a good chunk of my business at the time was senior facilities and retirement communities. We have a really good relationship with the ones around Seattle, but as you can imagine, even when things opened up, the senior facilities were much slower than everybody else to bring outside contractors in, rightfully so, but that added a whole other layer of challenges. Less apartments were being turned over, people weren’t moving, but we were able to go after the remodel business more. As people were staying in their homes more, they were picking out things they didn’t like and so we would come in and paint for them. So we had to change tact from what the previous owner had done for about 31 years. He was very focused on those apartment turns and rental turns and they’d been very good business for him but that kind of shock where people stopped moving out of those, had to pivot very quickly. And that followed right on to supply chain issues for two years. Some of those plants down in Texas last year, even, we couldn’t get certain types of paint or primer so it’s been a challenging three years with that.

Jake Nicholson: Have you made your way out?

Jake Cervilla: We have. So one of like emotionally pivotal moments after the first year where you take over the company, it starts to feel like yours, working well with the crews, then something as big as the pandemic hits. When we finally got back to the cash reserve cushion that I had pre-pandemic, it was like somebody picked a 100-pound backpack off my back. It was just an achievement moment. I don’t really know how to describe it other than maybe coming either backpack coming off or coming up from like a deep dive underwater and finally getting that breath above it.

Jake Nicholson: People often say that being a CEO is a lonely job.

Jake Cervilla: Yes.

Jake Nicholson: Did you have anyone to share that feeling with or did you have to enjoy that breath of fresh air by yourself?

Jake Cervilla: I did get to enjoy it with a couple people. My wife has been incredibly supportive through all of this and what I tell every searcher I talk to is communicate with your significant other before you even get into this. But I had a very supportive wife through the whole thing. I’m still in contact with two of my professors and we talked regularly. We still do but not as much as we did during the downtimes. And then one of my good buddies from undergrad actually is a searcher as well and he acquired a company out here and so we get together every other week maybe, because it can be lonely as the CEO. You don’t really have that — not many people have that perspective on their job, it’s a different setup, and having somebody like that to talk to is hugely helpful. He actually texted me about five minutes before we got on here to see if I wanted to go paddling with him this weekend just to catch up so I think we’ll throw our kayaks on Lake Union.

Jake Nicholson: During your consulting days, you mentioned that you had the opportunity to run a department once in a while but pre-search, you didn’t have a lot of experience managing people and then, all of a sudden, you’re in charge of a bunch of people through a crisis. I imagine it was a fairly high-pressure learning environment as a young manager.

Jake Cervilla: It was.

Jake Nicholson: How did you fare? If you were to performance evaluate yourself as a manager in that first year or two, how’d you do?

Jake Cervilla: It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, I’ll say that. I think I did well. There’s definitely sometimes I didn’t do as well as I should have but I would say I was on the positive end of it, especially for a new manager who hadn’t had to deal with a crisis like that before. Learning to trust employees with things and learning which employees to trust with certain things was the hardest part of my management learning experience. There were things I got right and things I didn’t in that aspect. But there’s things you don’t expect when you take on a company, like I did not expect to have to talk employees through losing family members, stuff completely outside of work and business. Just had no expectation of having to be also that on top of being a boss and a manager and trying to walk that fine line of humanity and work.

Jake Nicholson: You’re now three years into running the company. In what ways are you a better manager now than you were three years ago?

Jake Cervilla: Oh, man. I’d like to think that it’s a little harder to pull the wool over my eyes. They’re talking about a job site and why things are taking longer and in the hiring process, I think I have a better feel for employees when they’re interviewing, and picking teams, putting crews together. That has been the one that I think I’ve improved the most on is figuring out which personalities work best together on each job site and making those teams work and keeping good teams together. That was the hardest thing is finding which — because there’s a lot of personalities and labor is hard so things can flare so finding the groups that work the best through the harder jobs took a little time to learn how to evaluate that.

Jake Nicholson: What did you like about this business when you came across it in your search?

Jake Cervilla: The longevity, single owner, and the fact that they were business in the home and service industry that did okay through the ’08, ’09 crash. That was a big piece of mine and he was very open showing what the numbers were like and what happened during that phase. So I wanted to be ready for a crisis, I wanted to make sure the business could go through one and I’m glad I was focused on that with what happened. But that was a big part that stood out. And the fact that it had very strong recurring revenue. Recurring revenue and recurring clients were huge.

Jake Nicholson: Would you recommend house painting as an industry for future searchers?

Jake Cervilla: Only a very specific bit. If you have a recurring revenue base or group you work with, I would say go for it if you like it and it’s been sustainable, but having to win every client would be very challenging so it’d have to be a larger commercial-based company for me to recommend it to somebody.

Jake Nicholson: So you wanted to be a business owner from age 12-ish. You had family and family friends who were business owners and you wanted to emulate them. You had clients who were business owners as a wealth manager. You were a consultant to businesses and their owners for years and you wanted to carve out an entrepreneurial path for yourself. And now you are a business owner. Is it everything you imagined it would be?

Jake Cervilla: Oh, it depends on which age range you’re asking that about. It’s different than teenage me thought it was going to be. But it is. It’s been harder than I expected because of what’s happened in the world but it has more satisfaction and when I have the harder days where I’m down or tired or frustrated, take your pick, the one thing my wife always asks me is, “Well, what about you take this job over at Microsoft?” and say, “Nope, I don’t wanna work for anybody else. I wanna work for me.” She’s like, “Okay, then you’re in the right spot.” And that’s kind of the barometer for me. Still wouldn’t do anything else.

Jake Nicholson: Even if it paid you more than you’re making today?

Jake Cervilla: I like owning. I like it being mine. I’ve always had the want to make my own things, even fly fishing, I liked to tie my own flies, even though I’m not as good as the fly shops are. I get a satisfaction from doing it top to bottom.

Jake Nicholson: Do you ever wish you started from scratch?

Jake Cervilla: Sometimes I do. Sometimes I look at it, but then I think about Blacktail is what I started from scratch so that kind of satisfies that piece. And I would love to use Blacktail in the future once I have more cash to invest in other searchers because I love the model and I love the way it goes.

Jake Nicholson: Thanks for the segue. What do you think Jake is going to be doing in 20 years?

Jake Cervilla: Well, the goal and the dream would be investing in search deals, being a part owner in these companies and working with searchers and I would love to be like my adjunct professors at Tepper who taught me how to do it. I would love to teach a class someday. I need a lot more experience before I can impart even a smidgen of what they gave to me but I would love to be like them at some point because it was absolutely pivotal and they are still my best mentors.

Jake Nicholson: It’s a common answer but refreshing to hear every time that there’s this innate desire among many searchers to give back, to succeed and then give back, but even before success is tangible, you’re already giving back. Case in point, you’re sharing your story on this podcast. It’s a really heartening part of the model and the ecosystem, I think.

Jake Cervilla: It’s a nice part of the community because a lot of us, I mean, I wouldn’t have done near as well without all the people who did get the exact same thing. If they hadn’t taken my phone calls or my emails or been on podcasts that I listened to, I wouldn’t have been as successful as I was so I think it’s a give and give.

Jake Nicholson: For the prospective searchers that are listening to this podcast or even the current searchers who are looking to buy a business, I’ll let you take your pick, what would you like to share as parting words of wisdom to help these people live their fullest lives, I suppose?

Jake Cervilla: Yeah, definitely. I would say get those mentors and that team if you have investors that are outside of your investors, my two professors and a couple of my friends have been that sounding board safe group to talk to because they’ve been there, they understand it, and, like you said, the CEO section can be very, very lonely and having that kind of support is absolutely crucial when things aren’t going as swimmingly, when things are hard. You need those people to talk to, get advice from, or just to talk to somebody who’s been there and gets that it is hard and it is different than what you’ve done before. I think that’s key. And whether it’s professors and mentors or another owner, like my buddy I catch up with every other week or quicker, I think that’s very, very important.

Jake Nicholson: I just wanted to say thank you for spending time with me and sharing your story. I think there’s a lot that people can learn from it and, hopefully, we can talk again in another few years and you’ll have more stories to tell.

Jake Cervilla: I would love to, and I just really appreciate you taking the time to have me on tonight.

Jake Nicholson: Thanks, Jake.

(outro)

Jake Nicholson: Through the pandemic, Jake has focused, as many smart small business owners have, on internal operations, smoother, more efficient processes, happier managers, he increased work from home time and focused on deploying people more efficiently. Now, for the next 12 months, Jake’s industry is highly seasonal and exterior season, as Jake calls it, is June through October and the business crams a lot of work in during those months so he has the next 10 months or so to prepare for that by finding and hiring experienced, reliable people, which he says is always a challenge and this is a refrain we’re hearing from searches almost globally in this market. His aim is to return revenue to pre-pandemic levels by next year. And, as if he isn’t busy enough, Jake is also considering expanding his family in the near term. I plan to check back with Jake in a couple years and, from the sounds of it, he’s going to have a lot to update us on by then.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, you can find more at the searchfundblog.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. I’m Jake Nicholson of SMEVentures and you’re listening to The Search Fund Podcast.