The Origins and Future of a 9-Figure SMB Holdco

Well, we're going to hear your thoughts on the Silver Tsunami sometime later in this conversation. And Gantt, you also teach ETA and iu?

Tell me, what's that about?

Kelly School of Business graduate MBA program. We teach a seven week course called Entrepreneurship through Acquisition, the Art of the Small Deal. And we've been doing that for nine years now. My dad and I team teach it and we have a blast with it.

Wow, so you've been teaching an ETA class for nine years. Well, that really puts you ahead of the curve. Nine years ago. I mean now all the big business schools are teaching it, but they certainly weren't nine years ago.

We were there was because we looked at when we were trying to convince the business school that they should do this. At that point, Harvard, Stanford, Booth, Columbia, they all had their program and I'm not sure who else had a class but we, we were able to point to some top business schools that had it and say, hey, we should be offering this Here, it's important. Great.

Okay, well thanks for the, the history couple follow ups on that history. So this was to be clear, your father and grandfather weren't traditional private equity. They were really acquisition entrepreneurs as we now call it.

They were buying these businesses with some investors, but very informally, often partners that they would go into the businesses with. This was them figuring it out as they went. And yeah, not institutional, not formal, very entrepreneurial, right?

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean as, as my dad says, you know, he had his first business and he was figuring out any way he could to buy add on acquisitions. And in that time period the airlines were doing commissions and they would front money if you could convert another acquisitions clients to their airline instead of a different airline. And so he used creative ways to finance those deals.

And then for subsequent deals it was, hey, if I can live on 20% of what my company's making instead of 40%, I can use the other 20% to go buy the next company and keep rolling it in to future deals. And so that's how he built his Holdco basically of a bunch of different companies was through over a long period of time reinvesting the profits of his business not just into his current business, but…

One wonders why this is was so rare, why you don't hear more stories of this. We all now know what compounding means, but it doesn't seem like there are many, many stories like your dad's or your grandfather's. Maybe there are and those folks just aren't around telling them on podcasts and the like.

But it sure seems like he figured out something on his own that we all see as obvious, but wasn't obvious to his counterparts at the time. And, and so again, when, when you kind of talk about both in, in both of their cases being hold coast, they were, but they were, they were very industry focused. They kept doubling and tripling down on travel. Right.