Mikey Bolts Family Guy

[Cilinia Looker]

MikeyBoltsYouTuber InformationProfileMikey BoltsStyleParodyDate joinedJanuary 3, 2008Twitter / X@mikeyboltsFacebookTeamBoltsInstagram and Threads@mikeybolts

Other mediaTikTokVideos256+ScheduleUnscheduledStatusInactiveUsernameMikey BoltsPersonal informationFull nameMichael BalalisNationalityAmericanChannel trailer 27 Spongebob Impressions - Mikey Bolts

Michael Balalis (born: October 8, 1990 (1990-10-08) [age 33]), better known online as Mikey Bolts, is an American YouTube comedian and internet personality from Sacramento, California. He is known for his amusing facial expressions and Seth McFarlane-esque humour. Many of his videos are composed of him commentating on current events, pop culture, or everyday life instances.

He has a very strong fan-base,his main inspiration is CoryXKenshin,he says he doesn't know how he got more subscribers, and is growing steadily in popularity. Most believe this can be attributed to how connected he is to his fans, having many Q&A sessions with them, and being very open about his personal life.

Mikey Bolts does Family Guy impressions of popular songs, such as Royals by Lorde, Rap God by Eminem, Timber by Pitbull ft. Kesha, The Monster by Eminem ft. Rihanna, Talk Dirty by Jason Derulo, Happy by Pharrell, and Do You Want To Build A Snowman from the Disney movie Frozen.

Based on my math, with only three bolts per side in the rear (two upper shock mounts and one lower per shock), and only seven bolts per side in the front (three strut-to-hub bolts, three upper strut-mount-to-tower bolts, and one sway bar bolt), there were only 22 bolts in total. How long could it actually take to swap the new parts with the existing suspension?

So, the week before New Years, I headed over to Bimmer Werks in Beltsville, Maryland where my friend, shop owner, and Master Technician Amr ALkhateeb and I made the camber/caster plate swap. This involved disassembling the front struts, swapping the camber/caster plates to their labeled sides, and reinstalling everything.

Driving to work after the alignment was wonderful. It was one of those mornings where everything in my automotive world was in harmony. In addition to the suspension performing just how I wanted, the engine pulled strongly, the transmission shifted smoothly, and the interior was a very pleasant place to be. It was therapeutic.

A member of BMW CCA's National Capital Chapter, Mike Bevels served as editor of BimmerLife.com from 2022-2024 and co-editor of his chapter's magazine from 2020-2023. Mike enjoys spending time with family, attending automotive events, and working on BMWs.

We're going to have a conversation with Michael Orzetti. Michael was an officer and leader in the Marine Corps. After a number of years, he left and worked for a short period of time at a public securities investment firm, got a business degree, and then thought through his choices as between working in some other large company or institution, starting a company from scratch, or buying an existing, profitable business, ETA. He chose the last of those and set off on a search in which he funded his search activities, found a company, and then raised money from investors to buy that company. It's an interesting business he bought, and we're going to talk to Michael about the decisions he made and what happened on this journey.

Michael, welcome aboard. Rick and I are so happy to have you joining us so we can explore your search journey. And maybe a good place to start is just to tell us about the part of your journey before you decided to search, a little bit about your family, your career, you know, as you wended your way toward the decision to search.

Sure. Thanks, Royce. And thanks to both of you guys. It's awesome to be here with you. Obviously, I've looked up to you guys for many years, so a pleasure to join you in conversation. So, a little bit about me, I'm from New Jersey originally. I went to the Naval Academy for college, and afterwards I commissioned to the Marine Corps. In the Marines, I was what you'd call a signals intelligence officer, so think kind of focused on enemy communications on the battlefield. And look, I deployed when my oldest son was two months old and I came back when he was nine months old. And so my wife Megan and I wanted to think about things from a family-friendly perspective. Fast forward to today, we just had our fifth child recently.

I had all these great leadership experiences, but I couldn't have told you a whole lot more beyond what P&L stood for, right? I've always been pretty good at knowing what I'm not good at, which is a lot of things. And what I did not know a lot of the times was about finance. And so I wound up finding my way, and someone took a bet on me at Bridgewater Associates, which is a hedge fund based in Connecticut, where I was able to dive into the deep end and start learning a bit of the nuts and bolts of finance. And then proceeded on to Harvard Business School, where I met the two of you.

Mike, I'd love to pause before we move forward, at this point where you kind of pivoted and decided to search for an existing business to buy. Of course, an obvious alternative would've been to join some big organization, like Bridgewater, which you had worked for before, or some big company. What made you decide to pursue entrepreneurship versus that choice?

That's a great question. Look, I think I would break that question into two ways. One was sort of me-centric and one was me and my wife-centric, if you will. From a professional standpoint, I've always valued the ability to have ownership. And I don't necessarily mean financial ownership, though that's always good if you could drive that, but real ownership in what I was doing.

And in the Marine Corps, the things that I loved best about my time there, though I valued the mission and what we were doing, I always most valued working in a smaller team, where you know if you're working hard and hitting long balls, your teammates recognize that. And conversely, if you're not working your hardest, there's an accountability that comes from that. And the trust and a relationship that you can build with your team was always appealing to me.

Mike, you decided to self-fund your search and raise money when you found an acquisition to present to investors, as opposed to the other popular way of executing search, which is to go to a set of the regular search fund investors, raise a fund that'll pay you a salary and cover your search expenses, and then make the investment in the company. Why did you choose to self-fund your search instead of getting a salary and signing up with a search fund?

I think it's a relevant question, especially for some folks out there who may be considering this path. This was not a situation where we had a massive cushion. Look, I'd saved prudently over a couple of years -

So, we were very disciplined about a budget. And mind you, I started my search in June of 2018 and then I did not close a deal until August of 2020. So, this was all in the pre-Zoom-being-popular era, pre-remote era. So, there was no way with two little kids running around the house and then a third little kid in the house that it was going to be feasible for me to search inside the house. But I really didn't want to spend a whole lot of money on external office space. We were in Northern Virginia, and I must have called every landlord in probably a good 15 to 20 mile radius who had commercial space available, saying, "I am very disciplined on budget right now. This is just a stage of my life. I will sit in your IT closet if that's all you have for me, but I need a space outside of my house to work in. I will work in a windowless, cable-filled, room if it means that I can operate on a tighter budget here." And one gentleman was really nice, and he gave me an actually windowed, nice office for about a hundred bucks a month, something like that. And so I wound up searching outside of my house, but 15 minutes away. And I think particularly having young children, it was good just to be outside of the house because when you're searching for a business to acquire, it's good to have a segmentation between work and home, where this work thing is a constant sort of presence in your mind. Because your outcome is totally binary, unlike anything any of us will do in most other parts of our lives. It's a zero or a one at the end of two years, or at least that's the way you feel in the trenches.

That is a requirement of self-funded searches. Sometimes you have a working spouse or other people in your family who will help you along financially while you search. Michael had a wife who was a full-time mom and several children, and so -

A gaggle of children, and they really sat down and put a budget together and a time period they'd invest in searching to see if they could buy a business. And he really found every possible way to treat a penny like it was a manhole cover, right? That he didn't toss that money around easily.

You know, related to this frugality of the self-funded search, another thing I noticed in Michael's description is that he reached out to other acquaintances who are also searching and kind of created a group that was something between an advisory group and just a support group. Because searching alone is a very solitary activity, particularly when you don't have investors who can be regular sources of interaction. And he found a way to just make it a better experience and probably a more productive one.

Yes, this was a planned and thoughtful activity. It wasn't just rolling the dice and seeing what happened. Even the investment of his time was carefully thought out, you know, that he and his wife decided on a period of time to search. If it worked, that was great. If it didn't, they'd take another path. So, everything about what he did was really carefully planned.

And Mike, just following up on Rick's question, so the way you were finding businesses generally was identifying companies that might fit your criteria and then just doing a direct email or call to the owner. You weren't going through brokers, you were just going direct to these folks.

3a8082e126