My guest on this episode is Jordan Evans. Jordan grew up in an entrepreneurial family in California. His parents started a language translation and interpreting business when he was two years old, and it grew over the course of his childhood. It grew enough that he actually acquired it from his parents in 2019 and has since been growing the business organically and through strategic bolt-on acquisitions of other language companies. I love episodes of family businesses. I've become more interested recently in roll-ups, so this was a really fun episode for me.

Over the course of the episode, we talk about how his parents started and grew the company, childhood with entrepreneurial parents, best practices in running a fully remote team, and developing and growth through an acquisition playbook. Enjoy.

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Links

Language Network

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Topics

(3:48) - Jordan’s experience growing up in a family business and his ultimate decision to buy it from his parents

(5:07) - Jordan’s previous career in software

(7:08) - What options were you weighing when you were let go?

(8:31) - How old were you when your parents started their business?

(9:09) - Was there a moment when it clicked that your parents were entrepreneurs?

(10:40) - What was the overview of the business when you took over?

(12:34) - What do customer relationships look like?

(14:50) - How do you organize your team to handle so many different relationships?

(16:50) - How did your parents optimize the business around lifestyle and what changes did you make to prime it for growth and bolt-on?

(20:57) - What was the most difficult part of going paperless?

(24:32) - The process of hiring and developing a sales team

(28:01) - How do you manage a team of 1500+ freelancers?

(30:45) - What was the transition like from an office to fully-remote?

(32:36) - Why did you decide to start acquiring bolt-on companies?

(36:58) - What’s gotten more difficult as you do each acquisition?

(40:21) - Where do your deals generally come from?

(44:02) - How do you structure deals with sellers?

(46:50) - Have you used SBA debt at all?

(48:23) - What are you most excited for over the next year?

(50:07) - What college class would you teach if it could be anything?

(51:42) - What strongly held belief have you changed your mind on?

(53:26) - What’s the best business you’ve ever seen?