Yeah. Not something we intended to have as our outcome. I think when you do search, you do it because again, you want to control. That was the cards we were dealt to get the deal done.
Acquiring Minds
A Search Fund Journey to $350m
Excerpts · 387 segments · ~1:29:19 long
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And as a result, Housatonic, who is still, you know, our majority shareholder, has four of the seven board seats. And so technically, if anything came down to a vote, they have the voting majority. We've been very fortunate with them as a partner that it's.
There's never been, not one single instance where there's been misalignment from the board and them or Dennis and myself and them and where we've, you know, had to force it to a vote. So we've been very lucky having a majority partner that doesn't necessarily act like that.
But to be clear, so this is a, this is a question of control of governance. And with four of seven seats, they can, they ultimately have veto or the power to basically dictate terms if you aren't in the future in alignment on some big, big strategic decision.
That's right.
And so from your. And so that's risk for you guys or, or risk or, you know, not, not how you might want to structure things if you're trying to optimize for autonomy, which most entrepreneurs are also. So that's we're talking about here is investor concentration. Also, as you said a minute ago, if they kicked out or decided they didn't like the deal, they leave a really big hole to then have to…
So there's kind of risk pre and post deal to you guys. The searchers was what it was and happily it's worked out. But that, and, but again, to Underline it's.
That's pretty unusual. Generally in a traditional search fund, there isn't so much investor concentration. It's more evenly distributed across the participating investors, right?
That's right. We tried to seek out diligence opportunities where there were searchers who were in this same situation. So we can understand what it was like to be operating in a paradigm with a majority investor. I think at the time There were like two others CEOs running a business.
So probably less rare now. But certainly at the time a lot of entrepreneurs were not choosing that path.
And a big part of it too was the fact that, I mean, part of the reason why you needed to make this concession, if you will, was because it was such a big business.
Right.
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