A Search Fund Journey to $350m

I. I had just been in Paris with my husb. Saw like the essence of butter there. And in 20, you know, 16, 17, like that didn't exist in the US and coming from the beer space, saw how craft products could really take off.

Anyways, we went down this whole path. We visited all these farms and came to the conclusion that the unit economics of butter really suck unless you have like, specific milk subsidies. And so that went to the.

And he had done. He had built a company from scratch in business school that served senior living communities. And he just was kind of tired of the product market fit part of the innovative spectrum, and really thought we could be most successful taking on something that already existed.

Yeah. And to underline the fact that while you were running the craft brewery in under ambev, you loved that P and L experience. I mean, you were effectively running a small business and it felt like a fit. Except you also wanted to be able to make strategic decisions which buying a business would.

Would enable you to do. Great.

Exactly.

Okay, so we'll skip over a lot of the mechanics of the Search. We have a lot to get to today. I think the interesting element of that whole process, that whole chapter, is the fact that you got two businesses under loi, I guess talk to us about the one that you didn't end up buying.

Yeah, sure. That company is called FSI and we met the seller in late 2019. And the company itself provides maintenance software for healthcare systems. So think about it as you're the maintenance operator in a very large healthcare system.

This software tells you when and how your different pieces of equipment need maintenance and it routes people to fix that effectively. It was a true SaaS. It is a true SaaS business with a very small service component.

And we can talk about Abound at the time, but when Dennis and I looked at the 2 business opportunities to kind of figure out where 1, we could add most value and 2, which P and L was best equipped to absorb, both of us, Abound made the most sense for us and it definitely had more of that mission component to it than FSI did at the time.

And so we made a tough decision because, you know, Abound had not closed yet, but to pass the FSI opportunity off to another searcher after LOI phase. And so Zach, who ended up running the business, took over kind of getting that deal closed. And he's been there for I think almost six years, years at this point.