You know, I was fortunate enough at my time at Morgan Stanley to live through an integration when Morgan Stanley bought, you know, Smith Barney. And so I'm always calling on that experience when it comes to integration and always remembering that people implicitly hate change. And so that's always in the back of my head.
Acquiring Minds
Started Mid-Career, Grew to $38m in 3 Years
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But, you know, over time, you know, we're getting better at it and making it easier and you know, sort of creating our own internal playbook as far as how we go about doing that. And you know, if it's, I wouldn't say getting easier, but it's, we're learning, you know, learning a thing or two and applying that, you know, to future integrations certainly is, is a positive.
Getting better, maybe getting better, yeah. But, but it is, it is just. This interesting point that so often in kind of private equity, to the extent that searches private equity, you know, you, you, you, right when things are starting to really blossom is when the exit happens.
And so all that great blossoming, the, the almost the harvesting. Right. The next guy your buyer gets to enjoy, not you. So, so why give it up right at that moment, right when the really like you know, getting the foundation, the J curve, all of that right as it's behind you, then sell.
No, that's when you, that's when you really want to double down and start, start enjoying the momentum. I'm oversimplifying, but there's definitely something, something to this. The, the. And just what, how do your investors feel about this?
Of course, part of the reason that people sell is not just because they feel like it, but because their investors want their capital back. So, so we're often beholden to, to their time constraints. The investors, LPs, time constraints. What is your relationship to them?
Yeah, so all the investors know about what my long term vision is for the business and all are long term investors. You know, the general response that I got was as long as you're involved, you know, we'll, we'll still be involved. The minute you step away is, is when we're going to want our capital back.
And so, and so I think most, not all, but most of the investors are in it, you know, for the next 20 to 25 years. And, and that was something that I was, you know, very, very upfront about. One thing I didn't mention before, you know, searchers are always intimidated by the, or at least I find that they're intimidated by raising capital.
That piece was, I'm not going to say it was easy, but that was not as difficult as I thought it was going to be. When I launched my search, I updated my LinkedIn and I literally got, you know, 50 people reaching out to me, had 50 people reaching out to me saying, hey, if you buy a company and you raise money, you know, I'd love to invest.
You changed your LinkedIn and got all of this inbound from investors?
Yeah, yeah.
What, how, how? I have not heard that experience from other searchers.
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