Do you find that the set of challenges that meet you in Peru or Guatemala or Dominican Republic are more or less the same then? So these are immature private equity markets. Pretty small pools of available businesses to buy.
Acquiring Minds
The Searchers Building a $10m EBITDA Powerhouse
Excerpts · 361 segments · ~1:07:58 long
Short excerpts only — hear the full conversation on the publisher's site.
You have to hustle for capital raising. Hard to do big deals. So you probably start with pretty small deals by US standards.
But you have a first mover advantage if you're successful and you can quickly build a brand and reputation if you succeed. As you said, you, you're a notable buyer in Peru already now. So do you find that those dynamics are quite, quite similar across Latin America with the exception of Brazil?
I think it's right, yes.
And how would you contrast that to people who are starting out in the United States?
Man? Very different. Very different. So look, the US you've got probably hundreds of searchers looking at any one time in the U.S. you've got every type of searcher too. You've got the traditional guys, the accelerators, funded searchers, the kind of like search fund, Holdco things.
You've got lots of independent sponsors too, who are probably listening to this podcast and wondering why you had a search fund guy on here instead of an independent sponsor. In the US You've just got so much going on as far as who are the buyers, but then you've also got the largest community of small businesses in the world by a huge margin. So it's just a very different place.
The US Is also. It's almost hard to see this, you know, coming. If you're born in the U.S. you grew up in the U.S.
you know, this is the main thing you focus on, but it is the most transactional place on earth. It is a remarkable place where you can pick up the phone, call somebody and say, hey, I know nothing about you. I live 3,000 miles away, I'd like to buy your business.
And then the other guy, instead of hanging up, would say something like, how much? And you can actually do that. That isn't how anywhere else works.
So it's an interesting place, very well suited for private equity and this sort of micro private equity that we call in search. But yeah, it's super different.
Different. But how about difficulty? Where is it harder? Is it harder to be a first timer abroad or a first timer in the United States?
Want what comes before or after? Hear the full episode on the publisher's site ↗