The Flywheel of Buying Businesses in a Single Region

Chip on the shoulder. A chip on the sleeping. Don't wake the sleeping giant.

Don't wake the sleeping giant. Exactly.

I mean that is the easiest no ever. Nobody's losing their job. Nobody's losing their job by saying, you know, no to us.

They're not losing their job to that. They're losing their job by saying yes to this thing. And so, you know, for us it was, you know, your place based.

So where are you going to raise capital? You're going to raise capital from the place. And so it's high net worth individuals, family offices that, you know, and there's significant wealth here in west Michigan that, that saw what we're doing, believed in the long term vision of what we could do and, and could see this thing having this kind of compounding, you know, growing effect, you know.

And I think also this, this, this, I think people are also done with this idea of that PE gives the returns back in three to five years. That's total. They're giving it back in 7, 10, 15. I mean these things.

Why are there are so many continuation vehicles and, and all this discussion? No, and so it's, it's kind of fake talk about that being the, the case. There's high performers out there that are doing that, no question.

And kudos to them. Yeah, but I think that's a myth. And then, you know, I think the other fact is, is that you've seen a lot of long dated vehicles coming out from, from big funds that are these 15, 25 year term kind of vehicles. You got Brent Bior over at Permanent Equity raising, you know, a quarter of a billion dollars with a 25 year fund.

You got Cambrick, which is a Warren Buffett protege, which is like massive long term. I think she raised, you know, a couple hundred million and with the interest rate environment has, has definitely made that a thing that people are going to consider. And I don't think that's, I don't think that short termism is coming back.

I don't think interest rates are going to zero. Where we had that kind of dynamic where you could, you could buy and financially engineer these things. I think that's, that's over.

Well, there, there's certainly a, a very rich philosophical conversation to be had around short termism versus long termism. Whatever. Interest rates are great, Doug. And then the Western Michigan tie in, the searchers you partner with are actually not coming out of the school.