00:26:25 · Charlie Lamar, Ian Dallimore
[00:26:25] S1: Well, from my personal legal job, it became more and more in addition to just the normal business stuff like contract disputes or leases and the occasional dispute with landowners or advertisers and stuff like that, it became more and more of the legislative matters. And that kept me busy, has always kept me busy, I mean, for years. As I joked with Kevin Jr. One time when I was talking about retiring and he said, How can you possibly leave? And I said, Kevin, you don't understand when you get a phone call, mostly you get a phone call from a manager. They're calling you to tell you they got a million dollar contract or something, okay? When I get a phone call from a manager, it means that there's somebody at some level locally trying to put him out of business. [00:27:18] S0: So
00:27:18 · Ian Dallimore, Charlie Lamar
[00:27:18] S0: So [00:27:20] S1: that's pretty much what I did traveling the country, to put out fires for years, legislative fires. On the one directly related to that, my role in the bigger picture, we were an acquisition company. Yes. We're always an acquisition company. So everybody developed their own kind of task in connection with that. And so my task was basically to study the zoning and sign regulations for the target market and figure out both how amenable it would be for operations and how the restrictions would affect our business, which they affect us both ways. On one hand, they limit the ability to build. On the other hand, they also limit the ability of others to build. So it's a two edged sword. And also another aspect of it is back in those wild and early days, you sometimes found out that the company you were buying, they didn't have permits for all the pill breaks that they were selling. So then you had to go through that process. So we had a team very active in the 80s.
00:28:34 · Ian Dallimore
[00:28:34] S0: Yep, and still all the way through today. What I love about those stories is that the backside is, I would argue that that's almost more important, as I alluded to earlier, that's more important, the verification, solidity of a company or even the political environment. Because if you're a wise local sales guy back in the day, or owned a small company, and you got when that permits were about to be pulled and billboards are about to be illegal, I'll go sell to a company that's larger than me and wants to sell. And if you didn't do your judicial duty, you guys could be buying a company that would be gone before you even wrote the check for it.
00:29:15 · Charlie Lamar
[00:29:15] S1: Yeah, well, we spent a lot of my time making sure that that, well, that not only from a buyer seller point of view, but also from a legislative point of view. Vigorously defend property rights. So we very rarely had cities take our property without paying And for very few have just chosen to pay for it. So again, back to that period in the 60s when people were really nervous about it because there's a concept called amortization that is a used to be more of a threat to the industry, but it's still out there. I mean, it's a legal concept that's basically warning that municipalities want you to take the boards down over a period of time without compensation. Well, that would be obviously financially disastrous to say nothing of depriving the local businesses of the ability to advertise. But again, Kevin Sr. Had the wisdom to think, that people worry about that coming to pass, but it's not actually gonna come to pass. And it didn't.
00:30:21 · Ian Dallimore, Charlie Lamar
[00:30:21] S0: What is so kind of fast forward and Sean tells this great story about, and Keith East, our former CFO, Jay Johnson, who's our new CFO tells the story on the podcast on their own individual to be a part of when the company goes public. And I know I've fast forwarded pretty far along, but the day the company goes public, I would imagine the work that you have to do, you individually in your role is pretty significant leading up to that moment. But again, going back to it, is your bloodline, this is your grandfather's company that he started. What did that feel like emotionally? Just like, I wonder what my father would and my grandfather would have thought about this day. I know it's an emotional moment that may not mean a lot to most people like, yeah, companies go public all the time, big deal. But this one was a long time coming. It was a lot of family and even other families that were built into this. What did that moment feel like? And how did that feel just being a part of the bloodline of it specifically? [00:31:23] S1: Well, to step back from that day, that day was extremely exciting. The IPO went well. And so just all our family members became millionaires that day. So that was a wonderful day. [00:31:43] S0: Year is 1996 is when Lamar made its initial public offering.
00:31:43 · Ian Dallimore, Charlie Lamar
[00:31:43] S0: Year is 1996 is when Lamar made its initial public offering. [00:31:48] S1: But to get to that day and what happened before that day, we actually pretty much backed into going public. It was not back in 1991, it wasn't even a thought because it was our family business. Why would we sell it to the public? I mean, why would we sell it to other people? It's like selling it to somebody, some other billboard company. We wouldn't do that. And we really didn't think in terms of the sophisticated way it has turned out now. But we got basically forced into it by the financial crises of the early 90s where we had built over time, we built up buying more and more companies. Our our bank debt, debt got larger and larger. And strangely enough, these banks decided they want us to pay off the loan. Well, there's no way we're gonna pay off. I mean, we couldn't pay off the loan. Who had that kind of money? We would refinance every three, four years. And so that was a great operating model, a financial model for a while. But anyway, so we were told various avenues for saving the company. [00:33:00] S0: And [00:33:03] S1: eventually, well, first thing we did was back in 1991, I think we issued a bond. That really saved us. And so the whole idea that you could borrow money for ten years and all you had to do is pay interest on it was just like, wow, this is a great... [00:33:21] S0: I'll take one of those bonds today, by the way. [00:33:26] S1: Interest rate was a little high [00:33:27] S0: back in