We Turned $5M Into $419M Buying Cashflow Businesses ft. Jeremy Giffon

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, I've been chasing this guest today for six months, begging him to come on the podcast because I heard him on a podcast last year. And as much as this breaks my heart to say it, that was my favorite business podcast of the year. And it wasn't even our own, but he was so good that I asked him to come on. His name is Jeremy Giffon. He was the first employee at Tiny, which if you've ever listened to the podcast, we've had Andrew Wilkinson on many, many times.
They basically turned $5 million of starting money into about $500 million of equity just by buying businesses that cash flow. So they bought small businesses that cash flowed, kept recycling, recycling, recycling over 10 years, turned into 500 million. So I wanted to ask him, what was it like in the early days? What were those first deals like? He was there before they even had a name, before they were even called Tiny. So we asked him about his best deals, his worst deals, the weirdest deals he's ever done, negotiating tactics he learned. This episode is amazing. It's a 10 out of 10 for me.
Enjoy this episode with Jeremy.
Welcome to the show. We figure we've had your mentor on enough times now. Andrew, he's probably the most popular guest on the show.
Enough of Andrew. We gotta go to his protege. We gotta go to the young gun who was there from the beginning and have you on. Welcome to the show, man.

**Jeremy Giffon** (1:24)
Thanks for having me, guys.

**Sam Parr** (1:26)
Let's put Tiny into context because I think maybe somebody listening to this doesn't actually appreciate what we're talking about, Tiny. The simple story of Tiny is they had a services business, an agency, and then they had excess profits. And I think you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the numbers are something like they took five or $6 million of initial equity and they put that into Tiny and we're like, okay, we're gonna go try to buy a business with this.
And they've ended up turning five or six million of initial startup capital into roughly a $500-$600 million public company where they own, you know, Tiny owns maybe a portfolio of 30 businesses or something like that over roughly 10-ish years. Yeah, eight year period. So kind of amazing. And eight years turned $5 million to $500 million like, okay, I'm doing round math here, fuzzy numbers. But first of all, is that the right math? Is that roughly the right story?
And then walk us through the beginning days of that because you were there at the very beginning at 19, 20 years old, employee kind of number one there.
Walk us through that.

**Jeremy Giffon** (2:29)
Yeah, so I knew Andrew because when he was starting Metalab and I was working on another startup, we shared the same studio apartment. Our office was in a studio apartment and he was in the bedroom area and we were in the kitchen and we would keep a blowout mattress in case the fire guy came around and we would just say, oh, you know, Andrew lives here but I just have a lot of friends over, you know, working on stuff. And yeah, I mean, effectively like Metalab, the store, the short version is Metalab, you know, was throwing off a fair amount of free cashflow. I think it was in that range of, you know, low millions a year.
And the idea was just to go use that free cashflow to buy a business. And, you know, that's the thing with agencies, right? Like there's not a lot of reinvestment. So you got to do something with the cash. And if you're not gonna put in the S&P, like that's too boring or whatever, then you got to figure out something to do with it.
And so that's kind of what we did. It's funny, like people, a lot of people, hold codes and stuff are really popular now. And people, you know, a lot of people ask, how do I build Tiny effectively?
And the first step is like, well, you know, bootstrap a business that makes millions of dollars free cashflow and then like get back to me. The rest is like pretty easy. And that's the first start.

**Shaan Puri** (3:39)
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