Laurans Mendelson
Analyst · Arnie with CJS Securities. Please proceed with your question
That's a very good question. I'm glad you asked that, Arnie. The answer is, we are looking at a number of acquisitions. The problem is that some of the acquisitions that we've looked at, the sellers' expectation of sale price to us becomes unrealistic when their earnings drop. In this economic contraction, people start off with telling us that the earnings last year were X, and they're going to be up 20% this -- and then when you go in and do the due diligence, you find that it's very hard to support that theory. And, so then we say we'll still proceed and we have ... certainly have the capital to make the acquisition and we'll pay the same multiple, we don't want to get a lower multiple. But, we say to the seller; you have to be more realistic and you have to recognize that if you are not going to earn what you said you're going to earn, we can't pay you what we said we were going to pay you. So -- and then what we do is we say we'll give you an earn out, and if you really earn like you say, you're going to earn, you're going to get the same thing. Well, some people don't have this much confidence to put their money where the amount is and stand behind that statement that they're really going to earn and so we say we can pay you, and because as you point out, we're disciplined and we're not going to overpay silly amounts for companies that we're not earning it. The deals either full down or in some cases we decide that we'll wait and they'll wait, and we'll just see what happens. So I think we're looking -- at the present time we're looking at some very, very, interesting acquisitions, they're in the due diligence process. But ones that we are still looking at do not have the attributes that I just described, because otherwise we wouldn't still be looking at them. We think there are very good opportunities out there and if we pay fair prices and the one thing as you point out, we have the capital to make acquisitions. We have no problem writing a check. So we're looking at a number of acquisitions, the pipeline is full and set the appropriate time we're going to make -- we try to make accretive acquisitions of good companies, with good managements and I can tell you that the companies that we are looking at are in active due diligence, all meet those criteria.