Ben Gardier is founder and CEO of Linen Fresh Laundry. Over the past six years, he has acquired and operated multiple laundromats and commercial laundry facilities in the Arizona and Nevada area states. Prior to becoming CEO of Linen Fresh, Ben was a partner and CFO of Professional Equity Management, PEM, Ben was a CFO of National Laser Institute, NLI, the largest medical aesthetic school in North America. Previously, Ben was a partner at Bond & Greenleaf, a boutique M&A advisory and management consulting firm. Ben holds a Bachelor of Science and Master's degree in Accounting and is a Lean Six Sigma Greenbelt. I also know this is not written in Ben's bio, but I also know that he held a 4.0 GPA during his degree. And Maddie and I were actually marveling over that yesterday. So you must be a very dedicated and intelligent individual. 

Ben Gardier

Well, I had an advantage, and that being that I went to school a little bit later in life, so I was extremely focused on exactly why I was there, they would avoid a lot of the distractions. And if I was a lot younger when I went to university, that probably would have been 2.8 or something like that. 

Maureen Farmer

 I think you're very humble too. Okay, so welcome Ben to the Get Hired Up podcast. Again, I mentioned in the pre-call that I had seen you speak at an Association for Corporate Growth event in New York City last spring impressed with your story and I was impressed for a number of reasons, but primarily because your presentation was very well constructed and it was very specific and it was memorable and a number of us after the presentation were marveling over your story and I recalled the one phrase I remember was the 88 calls. And before we launch into the real story, I would love for you to provide a brief overview of your career to date, and just describe a little bit about your transition from CFO to independent sponsor, and maybe we can just start there.

Ben Gardier

Sure!

So, you know, the 88 calls, you know, as I indicated, I went to school a little bit later in life. I believe I was maybe 30 years old when I finally went to the university. But prior to that, I got my career started in sales. So in sales, it's a numbers game. You learn to deal with rejection and you just make as many sales calls as you need in order to achieve your goal. So that understanding has stuck with me throughout the rest of my life. And I believe that's one of the reasons why I've been successful at accomplishing things that I pursued for the most part. As far as my transition to independent sponsor from CFO, it wasn't too much of a transition. My primary responsibility at CFO was raising money and making deals. So that part was a pretty seamless transition. I don't exactly fit the definition of an independent sponsor, because an independent sponsor typically will find a deal, then they'll raise money and go acquire that deal. What I did was I put together a private placement. I said, hey, I've got four laundry businesses, including three laundromats with five years in business and a track record of showing strong compound annual growth rates over those five years. I'm a professional manager with CFO experience in private equity, and I'm raising $10 million to do a roll-up in the industry with the expectation of significant capital event in five to seven years, whether that be a dividend recap, exit of private equity, or IPO. So that's what happened. We raised the initial $10 million of committed capital.

So I guess in the beginning it was, it may be started off as an independent sponsor, but the particular strategy being, hey, we're going to be acquiring as many businesses as possible. You definitely need committed capital. So I was able to raise that in 2023. And I thought it would take us a couple of years to deploy that, but after three months, I realized that we would deploy that capital in probably less than a year. So I immediately had to go back out to market and raise another $25 to $30 million. And that was really when a lot of the effort happened because I kind of exhausted my Rolodex of people who would invest with the first $10 million. That money came from friends and family and referrals, people who I had known over my my time in business and the second leg of the capital raise, that was done at an interesting time because, you know, in the beginning when you're first raising capital, your only job is to raise capital. After the capital is raised, you start deploying the capital. Now you're growing the business, now you're operating the business, now you're having to go out and find acquisitions. So the capital raising part of what I was doing was interfering with executing on the strategy. And that's when I needed to kind of outsource that function. So the transition was pretty seamless. And in terms of operating the strategy, the big difference in that is just I've not worked in an organization in the past where I've scaled rapidly. So that's been the biggest growth area for me since transitioning from CFO.

Maureen Farmer

So tell us a little bit about the scaling process, you know, a day-to-day, a day in the life of someone who's just scaling a business like that. I'm just curious what that would look like.

Ben Gardier

It's like drinking from a fire hose. And that phrase is thrown out, you know, quite often, and I've heard it before, but I've never really actually felt it until doing this. So there's just everything that needs to be done. It needs to be done quickly. It all needs to be done at once, and there's never enough time to do it. So you can imagine if you're going out and you make an acquisition, there's certain things that come along with that. You have to take over the company, you have to integrate with your technology stack, you have to integrate the culture, you have to do those things, you have to have processes in place, you have to train people on those processes and you need them to execute. There's always a learning curve. It's going to be messy sometimes. You can take over a place and we had one location where we took over, we turned over the staff twice in 90 days. Wow. That's not typical. We thought that was just probably the best acquisition that we could ever do. It's still a good acquisition. It's just that we had challenges with staff. When you're moving quickly and you have an acquisition where you have staffing issues, you're kind of stuck. You're not necessarily stuck there, but it slows your pace. If you want to do 12 acquisitions per year and your team has a plan to integrate a location or several locations within 90 days and it takes you 180 days, that can slow things down quite a bit. But you can't really stop. So you have to execute, you have to work with your team to ensure that these things don't hold you back. And so to do that, you're working a lot of hours just because there are no excuses, it's just get it done.

Maureen Farmer

Right. And during that period of time, during the transition period, you're likely reporting to investors or reporting back to key stakeholders as well. So you're kind of two constituencies at once. You're working on meeting the needs of the business and the people, and then also the needs of the other stakeholders.

Ben Gardier

That is right. You've got financial reporting. Financial reporting is a big one, especially when you have a lot of investors and you have board meetings, and there's a lot of internal reporting that you need to do. So if you've been an entrepreneur for yourself and then you bring in a lot of money, you know, that reporting structure is going to change, you know, very quickly. There is a lot of things that you are going to provide that perhaps you didn't think was important for you to provide.

Maureen Farmer

Well, when you're a solo, you know, you kind of call the shots and make the decisions on your own. You may have an advisory board or an advisor. But now when you have equity partners or equity investors, you now have more than one boss that you report to.

Ben Gardier

Right. And there's a lot of things that you do. It's like, you know what? I do these things in my sleep, right? And gosh, I didn't think to me that I would need to explain these types of things, but you don't know the business like I do and you're not doing it every day. So yes, you need to, I need to explain these things. So there's a lot of things that one can take for granted.

Maureen Farmer

So can you give me an example of one, Ben? Like just what's something that you would take for granted that others would need to be educated on?

Ben Gardier

Let's say an equipment installation, for example. You know, we were doing a roll-up of laundromats and if we replace equipment, you know, it's something that we've done before. It's a fairly routine process. And, you know, so your board may want to understand, you know, what that looks like. And it's like, well, we're just doing equipment replacement. And so it's a routine thing, but it's like, what does that look like? Okay, I guess you do need to understand what it looks like. So then you have to go out and just kind of go in detail about it. It's really not a big deal. But if you're not used to that level of detailed reporting on things that may seem routine because you want to get your board on the same page. This is one more thing that you need to do.

Maureen Farmer

Yeah. So when I think back to the presentation that you gave, you mentioned that you were looking for ambassadors and you, and I remember the 88 calls, and you talked about that. Can you tell us a little bit about that process, what you were doing at the time and who you spoke to? I mean, not specific people, but you know, what types of people you were speaking with and, and how you, I would imagine you would need to have a fairly strong fortitude to make 88 calls. I'm sure that they weren't all yes's. 

Ben Gardier

Well, they were almost all no's. And early in my career, when I was, I was in 20 or 21, I got a job working in inside sales, selling office supplies, business to business. And I quickly rose to the top 20% within that company within about six months. And I would make 100 to 200 phone calls every day. And of those calls, I'd probably get a hold of 20% of the people, and 10% of those people express a little bit of interest and then maybe 20% of those people would end up doing business.

So a no is just, you know, I kind of expected to get a no, you know, so I wasn't surprised. Obviously I think that I've got, you know, everyone who's raising money, they think they have the best thing out there, the best investment, they think they're the best person to do it, but investors, they get, they see so many deals every single day and they don't know you. And even if they did know you, do they even, most people aren't that good at what they do. And how do they trust that, not only are you a trustworthy person, but you're a hard worker, you're competent, and you're not just going to quit when things get tough. Those are things that investors don't communicate to a sponsor. And there's just really no way to know. Like I if I were investing my own money, most of my money is tied up in this in our project that we're working on. But if I were investing my money in other people's deals, I would be very concerned, like, not that they didn't have a good plan, but could they execute on it? And so I am understanding that. You can understand why the success rate is – can be pretty low.

So it was just a numbers game. And the process of doing that over my career, I've assembled lists of investors, I've got a list of thousands of names. And through the process of having my assistant make phone calls or send emails, I would call people directly myself. Maybe I'd make 20 phone calls in a day. I didn't have much time to do anything more than that. I was making cold calls myself. And I was reaching out to my contacts and asking them for referrals and those types of things and going to wealth management conferences, going to things like the ACG event where I met you, Maureen, just to kind of get the word out. And in that process, so 88, I was just kind of being flippant at the time, but that was just kind of an example of the effort that it takes just to get one person to say yes. And it was probably a thousand no's for one yes to be candid.

Maureen Farmer

Yeah, well, certainly I know in another industry and the recruiting industry, I attended a conference a few months ago. One of my key takeaways was that in order for a boutique firm to place 18 people, they had to do more than 11,000 outreaches in one year. So that's phone call, email, direct message, whatever it might be. And so it is a numbers game. And I think that my message or that my, what I've learned and what I would like others to learn as they are, you know, looking for board opportunities or they're seeking a CEO role or whatever their professional goal is, maybe they're seeking an investor, that it's the persistence and the consistency. So the consistency of outreach and the persistence of that. So you've made contact with someone, they're maybe lukewarm and you not sure whether you should follow up with them. I say, continue to follow up until you get a no, because some people take a while to make a decision, whatever it might be, they may take a while to get to know you.

So I think that that lesson is a really important one and significant because I think unless you have been an inside salesperson making 200 calls a day or 200 calls a week or whatever it might be, you may assume that maybe nobody wants your product or that your product or your service or your investment might not be a good one when in fact it's a solid investment, but to your point, you have to educate these investors and earn their trust. How do you do that? Well, you have to open the door first. I think making the 88 calls is a testament to the numbers part of it, the consistency and the persistency. Then, getting out there to tell your story at the ACG was a very effective mechanism for really, I think, generating demands because otherwise you wouldn't be here today.

Ben Gardier

That's right. And, you know, I think what anyone needs to understand when they're going through the process of raising money and getting a lot of rejection is that the most successful people in the world have been told that they're not wanted and that they're not good enough.

Maureen Farmer

Wayne Gretzky, the famous hockey player, said that you miss 100% of the shots you don't take.

Ben Gardier

Right. Yeah, and that stands true here. One of the things that, aside from that, why raising money can be challenging is because in spite of all of those things, you still have to have a good investment product. You really have to be in the highest percentile because the product And I've looked at a lot of deals and I was fortunate enough to work with a marketing firm called Bad Twin. And they had a system to have more marketing emails land in the primary inbox. I interviewed a bunch of other people because, as I indicated, after we raised the 10 million and we were operating the business, doing acquisitions, we just didn't have time to, I didn't have time personally to go out and raise some money, so I needed some help. And this group was successful in setting at least 10 meetings per month, did those meetings and eventually found an investor who committed a substantial amount of money. And then aside from that, they took on the responsibility of raising an additional amount, which got us up to the $40 million on our second round. And the founder of Bad Twin, he and I developed a really good relationship. And I thought he was very professional. He's a young kid, probably his early 20s. He was very professional, much more professional than people two and three times his age that I had talked about raising money with. And she said, hey, can I use you as a referral? And I said, sure. I said, if you have anybody who wants to raise money, I'm happy to give them my impression of you and what it would take to be successful. And there were several people who I talked to and said, well, tell me about your product or tell me about your investment strategy. Some of them who had really good credentials, you look at their resume, these people look fantastic. They really couldn't clearly articulate what their product was. They couldn't articulate what their differentiation strategy was with their business or why someone should invest with them. They couldn't really show how their business would make money or generate returns for investors. And so I'm asking these questions and I was like, wow, there's, at that moment, I felt like there's a need in the industry for some coaching on that, because here we are, these people have somehow raised some money and they have, and it would seem to be an interesting product, which I didn't understand, but they had taken all the steps, but I could not see how any person who was responsible wouldn't invest any money with them because they couldn't explain it, right?

So to sum things up, aside from all the rejection, it's important to make sure that all those other things are really tight.

Maureen Farmer

Clearly articulated.

Ben Gardier

That's correct.

Maureen Farmer

And I also refer to this type of a communication as a signature story, an evidence-based, data-driven, differentiated story that demonstrates the value proposition to an investor or any other audience. So you did that very well the night of the presentation. So I'm not surprised that you've been successful in raising the money and also, you know, identifying someone like Bad Twin as a strategic partner in this process. So that's certainly well done for sure.

Aside from your own investments, can you tell me a little bit about what trends you're seeing in the lower mid-market M&A sector, if you have an opinion on that?

Ben Gardier

You know, I have been, I've had blinders on for the last couple of years, just really head down and try and execute on this roll-up strategy, and I have no idea what the heck is going on. Lower middle market M&A at the present time.

Maureen Farmer

Yeah, well that's reasonable for sure. What trends, I guess maybe let's look at your career trends so far, like what would you say to someone who aspires to do what you're doing? What would you say, trends or lessons learned?

Ben Gardier

That's a good question. I think that's a really important thing to remember. I think that's a really important thing to remember. I think that's a really important thing to remember. I believe that when you do that, when you are speaking with people along the way who can help you in your journey, they will definitely pick that up. 've gotten to know a lot of people, and now they don't tell you this, right? But maybe one day you'll have an intimate conversation and they'll tell you, oh, this is why I like you or this is why I trusted you. And it's very flattering, and it feels nice to hear that from someone that you've grown to respect. And on the other hand, if you don't have those types of qualities or you haven't worked on yourself and you haven't strived to be lucky if someone who you speak with, who may come off as a jerk, actually tells you what's wrong with you. But that's very rare. A lot of people just go around and spin their wheels.

Maureen Farmer

Ignore it or avoid it. Yeah. What I've learned is, and I didn't create this, I learned this, and I agree with it, that the only source of competitive differentiation is continuous learning. And regardless of what field you're in, you know, you have to be constantly learning and be curious. Be really curious about other people. Be curious about the industry. You know, that curiosity can, you know, help to build rapport and develop relationships and having a focus on other people and things like that. So those are some of the things that I've learned myself.

Ben Gardier

You know, it's interesting, Maureen, that, you know, you look at, you know, wealth in the United States and the top 10% of people are doing very well for themselves. I mean, the top 10% aren't necessarily millionaires, but they're doing fairly well for themselves. And a lot of the rest of the country is, you know, I would say the other top 40% have nice jobs and they're supporting their families, but maybe they're struggling to save for retirement and those types of things. And with anything, I really believe that 10% of people are really spending their time with continuous improvement, continuous education outside of what you learn in a university, reading books, you know, those types of things. And when you look at it that way, I think you really start to understand how, I believe that everyone is in the top 10% somewhere in their life. You just can't be in the top 10% everywhere, right?

Maureen Farmer

So interesting, yeah.

Ben Gardier

It's just really the continuous improvement in those areas. I don't think anyone can naturally be in the top 10% of anything without really spending their time focusing on it.

Maureen Farmer

I agree. Another quote that I learned years ago is that high learners are high earners. That always resonated with me as well. And I think it goes back to finding, I think you mentioned it earlier on, doing really well at what you're good at. So it's that strength, you know. Yes, I mean, it's important to address weaknesses if they impact your work or if they impact relationships. Obviously, that's important, but I think it's even more important to, if you're really good at something, to focus on developing that and making it as sharp as possible, making that scalpel as sharp as possible.

Ben Gardier

I agree with that, too. It's like, you know, doubling down. It's like working out also like if you go into the gym and you have a really hard workout and Ten more minutes or one more set go on the extra mile in an area that you're already good at that's where The bonus is earned, you know, that's where the horse wins by a nose In the Kentucky Derby, you know in those particular areas so...

Maureen Farmer

Yeah, it's fascinating. Well, Ben, it's been an absolute pleasure having this conversation today. I'm glad we finally got to do the call. I know we had tried to connect a few times. Before we go, I have two more questions. Well, three actually. What has surprised you so far in your career?

Ben Gardier

That I got to where I am, and I'm very happy with the position I am in now, but when I look back on my life, it didn't happen how I thought it would happen. It's a lot of loops and a lot of twists and a lot of turns. And I've always wanted to be the CEO, and I thought I'd probably get promoted within an organization to that. Or maybe somebody would hire me, but I was a lot younger and naive at the time. But now I am, and it's gonna be a really big company, and so I'm super excited about that, but just kind of looking back and how things went, just was really not what I expected.

Maureen Farmer

Yes. Second last question is, what is your favorite restaurant? We put together a list of restaurants for our listeners and travelers who are traveling around the world and want to have recommendations of quality restaurants. Can you give us the name of one or two that are on your list?

Ben Gardier

Yes, I can. In Phoenix, there's a restaurant called Rokakor. It's one of the best Japanese steakhouses that I've ever been to. Can you spell that? Yes, it's R-O-K-A-K-O-R. Spelled the same way frontwards and backwards. There's another restaurant I like, it's called Pala, it's in downtown Phoenix. Very unique dishes there, great cocktails.

Maureen Farmer

I'll be heading that way at some point later on this year, so I'll definitely have those two restaurants in my GPS, in my phone. And the last question I have for you, Ben, is how can people get in touch with you?

Ben Gardier

You know, you can find me on LinkedIn as Ben Gardier. I would say that's the best way for someone to get in touch with me.

Maureen Farmer

All right, Ben. Well, I guess that's a wrap. It's been a pleasure speaking with you and I'll be following you.

Ben Gardier

Thank you for having me on your podcast, Maureen. I really appreciate you thinking of me enough to put me on your show and I look forward to talking to you in the future.