Think Like an Owner

My guest on this episode is Alex Mears. Alex started his career in investment banking and consulting before leaving for the Navy and eventually returning to private equity at the Carlyle Group. Two years ago, Alex launched a non-profit called Search and Acquire to support veterans pursuing search. And he just recently announced a search investment firm he's co-founded called the Brydon Group to in...

My guest on this episode is Tony Layne. I met Tony and his wife Cassi at SMBash in February after several folks strongly recommended I talk with them and I'm glad they did. Tony and Cassi are lifelong entrepreneurs in various ventures, but by far, their most successful venture is Senior Dental Care, now called Aria Care Partners under private equity ownership. Senior Dental Care started as a mobil...

My guest on this episode is Tom Birchard. Tom has spent a great portion of his career managing service and operations teams for Ingersoll Rand and Trane, and as of March 2022, has taken a president role with a family office to acquire home services businesses. The family office is Whitney Wilder and it's technically a multifamily office based in St. Petersburg, Florida, that operates like a privat...

My guest on this episode is Ryan Turk. Ryan raised a traditional search fund in March 2020 and closed on Radiation Detection Company only nine months later in December 2020. Prior to searching, Ryan served in the Navy aboard nuclear submarine USS Michigan as an officer managing their onboard nuclear power system. Ryan used this experience to launch his impressively short industry focused search....

My guest on this episode is Preston Holland. Preston is the COO of FLYING Magazine, which was purchased in July 2021 by Craig Fuller and has been going through a broad transformation to a modern media business. Preston and I became friends over our mutual love of aviation and media, and our conversations are always wide ranging and leave me with a new idea or view of the world. I'm very excited to...

My guest on this episode is David Dodson. David started the second ever search fund after being a Stanford case writer, purchasing Smith Alarm Systems in 1989. Over his career, David has been the CEO or executive chairman of five companies, has and continues to invest in search funds today through his firm Futaleufu Partners, and he is a professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business, teaching...

My guest on this episode is Glenn Gonzales. Glenn is the founder and CEO of Jet It, a fractional share private jet business with a unique model serving customers across the country and in Europe. Prior to founding Jet It, Glenn was an F-15 pilot in the Air Force and sold private jets on behalf of Gulfstream and Honda. This episode is a deep dive into all options available for business owners who w...

Welcome to the first episode in our trilogy search partner series with great entrepreneurs and investors from the traditional search world. Today, I am joined by Nikita Sunilkumar and Kush Das who both search and acquired home healthcare businesses through the traditional search process. Kush acquired Ennoble Care and works as a CEO today. Nikita acquired Crown Health in June 2020 and, in fact, ju...

My guests on this episode are Michael Curry and Keith Burns who together have acquired 11 diagnostic radiation and other physics services businesses since 2014 through their platform Apex Physics Partners. This episode is loaded with wisdom and insights. I had a number of alternative titles I considered based on quotes for the conversation like "the CEO of Delta doesn't know how to fly" or " putti...

My guests on this episode are Lori Harrington and Bruce Vanderzyde. Lori launched a search in October 2020 and recently acquired Bruce's company Anterra Tech at the end of 2021, which offers business intelligence software for the construction and real estate industries. This episode is a great discussion of how building a better relationship with a seller, negotiating upfront, bringing great advis...

My guests on this episode are Justin Burris and Tim Ludwig who together have co-founded a new search investment fund named Majority Search. Majority Search aims to be the preferred buyer of small companies while giving searchers the chance to own the majority of the companies they operate. This is a brand-new model they've spent the last year working on, and I'm so excited to see it finally become...

This week is a bonus episode. We are cross posting a guest appearance I had on John Wilson's Owned and Operated podcast. I'm a big fan of John and enjoy his podcast immensely, and I wanted to share it with you all. In this episode, I share more about my philosophy behind the Operator's Handbook and all the ins and outs you want to know about podcasting. Near the end, I manage to turn the mic aroun...

My guest on this episode is Greg Geronemus, co-founder and managing partner of Footbridge Partners, a traditional search investment firm. This is my second episode with Greg, the first being episode 17 back in April 2020, where Greg shared his experience acquiring and operating his search company SmarTours and launching Footbridge. Well, two years later, Greg and his partner David have raised that...

My guest on this episode is Mehtab Bhogal, co-founder of Karta Ventures. Karta is a Canadian based e-commerce acquirer investing primarily in e-commerce turnarounds, a corner of the world I didn't even know existed but that is incredibly fascinating. This episode is one of my recent favorites because of Mehtab's ability to share high level insights and then, in the next sentence, dive deep into ob...

My guest on this episode is Sam Shepler. Sam is the founder of Testimonial Hero, a company he bootstrapped that helps companies create more effective video customer testimonials. Sam and I spend much of the episode talking about how to create great testimonials for your company and what the driving reasons are for using video over text or other mediums. In addition to being focused on a really int...

My guest on this episode is Robert Graham. Robert worked in management roles at Eaton prior to attending Harvard Business School, after which he worked in investment banking and private equity. Eventually, he decided to search for a business after seeing his HBS classmates do it, and today Robert is Managing Partner at Pillar Health Group, the holding company for four healthcare businesses he acqu...

My guest on this episode is Eric Friend. I reached out to Eric after seeing him talking on Twitter about his family's printing business Friend Paper, which was founded in 1908 in Zion, Illinois, by Eric's great grandfather. As a print publisher through our quarterly publication called the Operator's Handbook, I was curious to hear what ideas he had on using print as a content medium. It turns out...

John founded a professional services company in 1984 focused on energy conservation, inspections, and design work for large companies. He eventually grew the company to 43 employees and $13 million in sales and sold to Eclipse Combustion for $10 million in 2011. Since selling the business, he has taken on specific consulting projects to keep himself active and in the loop. I met John at a happy ho...

My guest on this episode is Jordan Evans. Jordan grew up in an entrepreneurial family in California. His parents started a language translation and interpreting business when he was two years old, and it grew over the course of his childhood. It grew enough that he actually acquired it from his parents in 2019 and has since been growing the business organically and through strategic bolt-on acquis...

My guest on this episode is Chris Williams. I was introduced to Chris via Justin Vogt about a year ago. And since then, Chris and I have talked monthly about his search, thoughts on running a small company, the podcast, and all things work and life. I've really enjoyed getting to know him, and I'm thrilled to have him on the podcast finally. Chris recently bought a bookkeeping and accounting outso...

My guests in this episode are Austin Hall and Palmer Higgins. A few months ago, I ran a survey with Think Like An Owner listeners to get feedback on the direction of the podcast. And one of the questions I asked was on new episode formats. One of those formats that received great feedback was facilitating conversations between two owners in similar industries that they could dive deep into their o...

My guest in this episode is Ryan DeCaire. Ryan joined a private equity firm called Ashbridge Partners in Toronto Canada and became president of one of their portfolio companies, Geroline, in February 2019. Geroline is an industrial safety products company that sells ice cleats to companies in the energy, aerospace, mining, transportation, and construction industries among others. Geroline has a pr...

My guest in this episode is Sandro Mina. Sandro is a co-founding partner of Relay Investments, a search investment fund based in Boston. Prior to Relay, Sandro and his partner, Martin launched their own search fund after graduating from Stanford's MBA program in 1991, acquiring and eventually exiting three companies. Sandro delves at the company he ran called Camera World and explains what this wo...

My guest in this episode is Timi Okah. Timi is the first CEO in Kingsway Financial CEO Accelerator Program, having acquired an HR and accounting business called the Ravix group in October this year of 2021. There's several interesting wrinkles within this search model. One of the most interesting being that Kingsway is a public company and Ravix was acquired as a subsidiary of Kingsway. On top of...

My guest in this episode is Collin Hathaway. You might remember Collin from Episode 32 back in October 2020, which quickly became and has remained the most popular episode of Think Like An Owner. Collin joins me again to more deeply discuss lessons learned through his career of buying and building HVAC and plumbing businesses across the country.  Just like last time, this episode is filled with gr...