A Searcher’s Second Act: Building a $25m Holdco

But my year, they had launched kind of a part two for folks that really want to dive into this after graduating. And that class was more like 30 or 40 people. So a much smaller number of us that could work.

And you're exactly right. Well, that class, that set of experiences that I got with with those professors and with those classmates. really helped me go from this being a concept to actually something I might be able to do.

And, you know, getting to read those stories that they really kind of helps you understand, like, is this for me? Is this something I want to do?

And, you know, of course, when you get two great mentors like, you know, Rick and Royce, as people that you can continue to interact with and learn with, I think it became for me something that I felt like there was a network between my classmates that were going to search, between these professors that were kind of building this community that I could work through and learn together with and…

Yeah. And in fact, Rick and Royce did become true mentors because they invested in your search. So now take us into the chapter of your actual search.

Yeah. So I did a search that was, I would say, somewhat, you know, limited in terms of both geographic constraint and a industry constraint. So first and foremost, I wanted to acquire something in the oil and gas sector, as I noted earlier. Fortunately, that does align well with the Houston market.

There's a big oil and gas sector here. But in many ways, I was kind of drawing the funnel a little bit tighter than I think best practices had been on how to search. And so for me, I was approaching the search not as a volume game of, you know, trying to send as many emails as I could or trying to look at kind of deals across the country.

I wanted to be much more... constrained and trying to find something in this local geography and in this industry. And so for me, what that meant is that some of my sourcing was a little bit different.

Um, you of course, you know, did the standard things that working with brokers and trying to get on to, you know, to list service and make sure you could see deals. But I also did a lot of work around trying to get to work with local accounting firms that may have clients that were kind of reaching, uh, retirement age, working with attorneys that were here in Houston.

So trying to do a lot more to build like a Houston-based network to find deals. I tell you that's the approach I took, but it's actually funny how I found the deal that I ended up transacting on. So LK Industries is the first company that I bought.

It's a niche manufacturing firm in Houston that makes oil testing equipment. The way I got connected to that deal... is I was looking at another deal in Dallas, Texas that turned out not to be a fit.