Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion about disruption, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
Thank you for having me, and sure. When it comes to my background, I had a different path than most people who take to the world of private equity and buying businesses.
Since I was a little kid, I have been very into golf, and I wanted to be a professional golfer. That was the dream from the time I was nine years old all the way through the end of my college career. I got a scholarship to play golf at USC, which was my dream school. I pursued that vigorously, so I didn’t do the normal internships that people do to prepare themselves for jobs in finance. I studied business in school, and I was a good student, but I was focused on trying to make it to the next level as a golfer. I realized by the end of college that I wasn’t good enough to make it as a pro golfer, so I was kind of scrambling to figure out what I wanted to do.
I was lucky to meet a couple of USC alums, and they gave me an unpaid internship right after I graduated where I could learn and gain experience. That eventually turned into a full time role and I pretty quickly fell in love with this idea of buying businesses.
I was really lucky that I was able to pivot so quickly and find something I was so passionate about right out of college.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
The two biggest things that I mention every time I get introduced to a business owner that’s considering selling is Evergreen’s buy and pull strategy.
The whole reason we started Evergreen — and the reason we named the company Evergreen — was that we wanted to acquire companies and support their growth over an indefinite hold period. Being a long-term home for a business is important to its future, to the people that work there and to the customers they serve. It’s a lot more fulfilling than buying and flipping businesses.
The second piece is we’re big believers in decentralization. At Evergreen, we look up to companies like Berkshire Hathaway, Constellation Software, and Transdigm. These are companies that have been incredibly successful through operating their different business units independently, keeping the brands that they acquire intact and empowering the CEOs of those businesses to drive results, versus the more traditional, top-down decision making.
If you’re a business owner looking to sell your business, your options are generally to sell to someone who’s going to flip it or to sell to someone who’s going to integrate it into a bigger company, and you lose the identity of the company. So that’s been a big differentiator from our first acquisition to today. Our first acquisition at Evergreen — Wolf Consulting in Pittsburgh — the founder Lloyd Wolf was looking to sell his business and he had three offers at roughly the same valuation. He chose us based on those two factors, the long term hold period and the decentralized operating model. So, that is the philosophy we’ve really leaned into.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
I can only think of two. The first one would be persistence. Persistence is one of our three core values at Evergreen, and a big reason for that is that I personally feel like anything worthwhile I’ve ever accomplished required a lot of persistence. An example of this was a business we acquired in 2022, a great company out of St. Louis, called GadellNet. The guy that ran the business was someone I got in contact with in 2017, but that wasn’t the right time for them to consider selling it. So, we continued to check in, were persistent over five years and finally in 2022 he called me on a Friday, and said ‘hey, you know my other partners are open minded to selling the business now. If you’re ready to talk about this we have to move quickly.’ This was after five years of talking to someone and getting nowhere. We ended up signing an LOI the following week and closed the deal within two months. So, I think that was a good example of persistence and just sticking with it over a five-year period and being disciplined about that. Many of the businesses we acquire are companies that we have built relationships with over many years.
Next, I would say investment judgment and putting the company first. My jobs prior to starting Evergreen were focused on sourcing new acquisition opportunities and your incentive there is to kind of push deals through. I think one of the reasons that we were backed by Alpine, who’s our private equity backer, to start Evergreen, is because we exercised good investment judgment. I think I’m good at being able to recognize what is good for the company and may not be good for my own personal incentives and being able to manage that. So, I tell all the people that are starting their careers at Evergreen how important that is to not just think about your own incentives, because you’re never going to have a perfect incentive system. You got to just think about what’s best for the business and build your career around being the person that can be counted on to do that.
Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader? I’m curious to understand how these challenges have shaped your leadership.
There’s a story from when we first started Evergreen that I think is very applicable here. In the early days, we were looking at two companies, one MSP and the other was a business in the property management sector.
We liked both businesses, but we had to make the tough decision to pass on the property management deal, and that entailed me calling the owner and saying, ‘Hey, we’ve decided that we’re not going to move forward with submitting an offer here.’ That was tough to do, but in the end, it was the right thing to do.
I think the biggest thing that I took away from that experience was learning about the power of focus. I believe that being hyper focused helps performance and I brought that into my leadership style. It does entail making trade off decisions like choosing to not enter an industry or passing on a business that you really like to make sure you give enough of your time and focus to your best ideas. That was one experience from the early days of Evergreen thatwas very formative for us.
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. Let’s begin with a basic definition so that all of us are on the same page. In the context of a business, what exactly is “Disruption”?
I think disruption is about doing something completely different from the rest of the participants in your industry. There are other forms of disruption that are more technological in nature. For example, we used to watch DVDs and now we stream movies.
That’s a different form of disruption than what we’re doing, which is taking a radically different approach to buying and operating businesses.
How do you perceive the role of ‘disruption’ within your industry, and how have you personally embraced it? Is it a necessity, a strategy, or something else entirely in your view?
I think of it as an opportunity. I think private equity and the world of buying small private companies has burst onto the scene in a big way over the last several decades.
Over the last decade especially, you can see how much money has gone into private equity. That has created a more competitive environment where there are a lot more buyers chasing the same number of companies. I think the opportunity for disruption lies in the fact that a lot of those buyers have similar pitches to business owners. If you can do something completely different, you can really stand out. At Evergreen we are going to buy your business and hold it indefinitely, we’re going to operate it independently, and we’re going to help you with your succession plan versus just riding you continuing to run the business for a few short years like most private equity firms do. That’s a disruptive strategy and I think it helps us win more deals.
What lessons have you learned from challenging conventional wisdom, and how have those lessons shaped your leadership style?
I think challenging conventional wisdom is difficult because often conventional wisdom is conventional for a very good set of reasons. You can build an entire career and an entire business based on just finding one or two points of conventional wisdom that you challenge, so I think it’s a mistake to just always flout conventional wisdom.
The reality is, most of the time you should believe conventional wisdom, but there are select opportunities where breaking from conventional wisdom can be what you need to unlock a huge opportunity. So, acknowledging that and having the mindset of being more selective with when you chose to be a contrarian and when you choose to follow conventional wisdom is really important.
Disruptive ideas often meet resistance. Could you describe a time when you faced significant pushback for a disruptive idea? How did you navigate the opposition, and what advice would you give to others in a similar situation?
This one is really clear to me. Our whole strategy of buying and holding businesses faces a lot of pushback because people naturally ask the question, how do you make money if you don’t eventually sell the business?
When we studied the people who’ve been the most successful, who have created the most wealth in their lifetimes, they are almost always people who own large stakes in single businesses. It’s Warren Buffett’s stake in Berkshire Hathaway, it’s Elon Musk stake in Tesla and SpaceX, it’s Mark Zuckerberg stake in Meta, it’s Bill Gates’s stake in Microsoft. They didn’t build that wealth by buying at one price and selling at a higher price, they got there by building great companies over decades.
Despite that, the conventional wisdom in our space is thatthe only way to make money and create wealth is to buy and sell companies over a five-year period.
What are your “Five Innovative Approaches We Are Using To Disrupt Our Industry”?
At Evergreen, the things that we are doing to disrupt the industry are baked into our core values as a company.
1. Empowerment — At Evergreen, we choose to empower our leaders and teammates to take ownership of their domain. By placing trust in the talented indviduals at the businesses we acquire, they make better, faster decisions.
2. Rolling Snowballs — We believe in the power of continuous improvement. We do that by retaining a company’s employees, investing in its growth and maintaining its culture. When we invest in the right company and in the right people, the result is uninterrupted, compound growth. People often overestimate what they can accomplish in the short term but underestimate it in the long term.
3. Persistence — At Evergreen, we are relentless. We set aspirational goals, set ourselves to higher standards and always pursue opportunities with passion.
4. Dedication to a Long-Term Acquisition Strategy — Our mission and values are what make Evergreen stand out against the industry norm. We are committed to acquiring businesses indefinitely and empowering management teams to achieve their long-term goals.
5. Preservation — Evergreen is dedicated to preserving a company’s talent, culture, and legacy rather than forcing it to assimilate to a larger company. This can be an unusual tactic in the M&A industry. We want to recognize the value of building upon existing talent and leadership instead of starting from scratch. At the end of the day, our goal is to help your business grow and thrive without restructuring the foundation it was built upon.
Looking back at your career, in what ways has being disruptive defined or redefined your path? What surprises have you encountered along the way?
The model that we’re pursuing at Evergreen and how disruptive it is in the world of buying businesses has defined my whole career and I hope it still defines my career many years from now.
I’ve only been in the workforce for 10 years and Evergreen has been about seven of those years. Our approach has resonated, and we’ve been fortunate to have achieved a lot of success in a short time.
Beyond professional accomplishments, how has embracing disruption affected you on a personal level?
Well, I have a one-year-old at home, so my sleep is being disrupted regularly. I know that’s not be the answer you were looking for, but that is one of the biggest things going on in my life right now obviously.
Finding that balance between running a fast-paced company that’s pushing the envelope in so many ways while also finding the time to be an engaged father and be home for dinner with my daughter has taught me how important it is to narrow your focus to things that you are really passionate about.
In your role as a C-suite leader, driving innovation and embracing disruption, what thoughts or concerns keep you awake at night? How do these reflections guide your decisions and leadership?
I do think a lot about disruption in the underlying industries that we’re in, and want to make sure we are the disruptor and not the disrupted in those areas of business.
Businesses are always changing, and I think that’s one thing that keeps me up at night. I’m constantly asking myself ‘What are the industry trends that might be disruptive that we can get ahead of?’ or ‘How do we proactively disrupt the underlying industries that we’re in, instead of being disrupted by external forces?’
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
I have two things that come to my mind, one more personal and the other more professional. The professional one would probably be trying to bring our permanent ownership structure and strategy to more businesses. We employ over 4500 people now through our businesses, and I think they are better off working for a company that has a long-term ownership strategy than if they were working with a short-term owner. That would be something we can achieve by growing Evergreen, and it would do a lot of good for the people that work at the small businesses we acquire.
As far as what I’m personally passionate about, my younger brother is autistic and has epilepsy, and there are a lot of challenges he faces as a result of that. I’ve always felt like if I had the opportunity to make a difference for people like my brother I would do that. I would want to do something that assists them with living on their own and be more in control of their lives. There are some organizations doing amazing things to that effect, but I would love to be able to bring more funding to those causes. I think I would get a lot of fulfillment from doing something like that.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
They can connect with me on LinkedIn! They can also go to Evergreen’s website: https://www.evergreensg.com/
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
Thank you for having me!