The Origin Story of a Compounder ($80m and Counting)

Whose name will probably reappear over the course of our conversation. Okay, so. So now if we could get into the origin story then of, of Hickory, the two of you and John, what did that look like?

Yeah, so I'd say some of the earliest origins were when at this time we were all living in Boston. John had, was someone who I had worked with on some of those businesses in China a few years before. He had gone a different route and was looking at a career in private equity.

And if we could bring just 10% of the technology and the data forward approaches that exist in, in these other realms to the idea of finding great small businesses, we could do way better than what that baseline would look like.

And so, Greg, you mean specifically bringing tech to deal sourcing? Specifically finding businesses to buy?

Specifically finding businesses to buy at the smaller sizes of the market. And keep in mind, this was a number of years ago. So. So a lot of the trends that became popular more recently were different then there were.

The expectation was that for anyone who was thinking about buying a business below, let's say 2 million of EBITDA, you were either working a lot with brokers or you were kind of in go to country clubs and do very, very old school networking in order to, to meet these business owners and establish a relationship with them. And there wasn't a lot of publicly available information about any of these…

People were kind of not on the radar so we thought that we could take a much better approach to finding great companies to partner with. And the idea was then once we did that we would point the same kind of high volume and data forward approach to finding investors and also to, to helping modernize the companies, find customers and grow revenue.

So, so tech enabling small businesses, it was pretty innovative at the time, you, you felt. Or, or it just not being done,.

You know, it was, it was not being done at the time and, and people were really against it, you know, now and, and we sit in this position now, right, where we get 20 emails a day from anyone from actual, from large private equity groups to a person in a dorm room who decides that they're going to spam email a lot of company owners. No one was doing that then.

And in a lot of ways I think we were doing it a lot better than most people are doing it now. And this is something that we, we thought of it as a software play potentially in the early days. And is this something where we try to build the software, where we try to sell the data?

Is this a platform where people go to look at businesses? And what we eventually decided was that we could use this a lot better ourselves and both control the process more and control the outcomes more and more and potentially do really well for ourselves by, by being the people who actually got in and owned the business and using this to help fuel that.