Why I am pursuing the opportunity to "Pass the Torch"

In short: I want to make a tangible difference for employees and customers so I can make a difference for my family and the community we live in.

I grew up in Dayton, Ohio in an entrepreneurial household. My father's experience with Winsupply sowed the seed for me to pursue an entrepreneurial venture. My two older brothers were and still are tremendous role models. My oldest brother, an officer in the Marine Corps for 20+ years, and middle brother has always been a natural teacher; is a finance professor. My parents created a hard-working foundation that has served us all well as professionals.  We are forever in their debt as tremendous parents. My dad worked at Winsupply and my mom, held it all together while pursuing her passions as an educator and raising three sons. I joined William Blair, a middle market investment bank, out of college with no idea what I wanted to do "in life" but sensed I wanted to follow a path like my dad's. I figured the hours and demanding expectations in banking would teach me a lot as I put in 80 hour weeks. I ended up taking in even more than I had imagined. 

At Blair I supported clients in various industries - mostly services businesses. With that exposure I came to develop an eye for characteristics which separate average companies from those which really focus on delivering for their customers. Flinn Scientific was a perfect example of an incredible company. Flinn Scientific is a science supplies distribution company that made pre-packaged science experiments for K-12 educators. The leaders of this business truly understood that Flinn Scientific did not exist to sell bulk orders of chemicals or biological supplies for experiments. Flinn Scientific sells lessons in pre-packaged units of 30 packs so that teachers focus on the learning outcomes - not spending time measuring out chemicals. All of the clients I had interactions with at Blair had similar stories of crucial understanding of their target customers and how they could delight them. All of these companies engaged in commerce, but to describe their organization as simply an "asset" would distort the vision and passion that had been invested over the years focusing on going the extra mile for their customers.

I enjoyed my time at William Blair, but came to realize that I desired to do more than offer advice to businesses. I wanted to involve myself with the operations which I watched and marketed from afar. The closest I had gotten was walking a potential buyer through an office - not working with employees. While looking for the right opportunity to join a business, I stumbled across The Vistria Group, a middle market private equity fund that was just getting off the ground in Chicago. I had been offered the opportunity to stay with Blair and be promoted to a role typically reserved just for individuals who have gone on to get and MBA, but Vistria and my belief that I would have the chance to work in a business' operation was too appealing to me.

My time at Vistria was unlike any other. I realized how important every detail was when committing substantial sums of money to acquire businesses. At William Blair, it was our responsibility to articulate an optimistic version of the world. I'm optimistic by nature, but found that implicit optimism to be problematic in certain circumstances. Unfortunately, sometimes things don't go right, the revenue doesn't come through, or managers don't act in ways faithful to the vision of the founders. 

The companies I supported while I was at Vistria were:

• Penn Foster
• Apollo Education (Parent of the University of Phoenix)
• AngelMedFlight
• Supplemental Healthcare
• ForwardLine Financial

The investments I supported at Vistria did grow and deliver the promises to their customers, but while I participated on company boards, I came to realize that private equity professionals don't involve themselves with the operations of the businesses they own.

While I learned about and understood the broad strategies pursued by management teams at our companies - my reason for joining Vistria ended up not being achievable. I had wanted to work in a business - supporting employees on a day-to-day basis. Private equity professionals responsibility is to make successful investments and the only way to accomplish that is to focus on transactions; not to involve themselves with the previous transactions they've made on a daily basis. I had multiple conversations with my dad, asking him how he had put in the long hours and sleepless nights while at Winsupply - and he only said this once, but it resonated so deeply with me "We were building something." Even though I was supporting great organizations, I did not feel as if I was building something - only doing deal after deal.

While at Vistria, I evaluated an investment in a company called Little Sprouts. Little Sprouts was an early childhood education company lead by a younger man named Mark Anderegg. Mark, shared that he too, had always felt out of place on the private equity "side of the table" and that he wanted to support a business and mentioned that he pursued it via something called a search fund. Mark had raised just enough money to cover living expenses and spent ~2 years looking for businesses before he identified Little Sprouts. The investors who had covered Mark's living expenses ended up providing the capital to acquire the business (I am now lucky to consider Mark now a financial supporter of me).

I shared with Chloe, my wife, that I had thought I might want to pursue a search fund, but that I wasn't sure that I could pursue it while at Vistria. Chloe with a stable job encouraged me to apply to business school to use the time to formulate my strategy and not "half-ass" the the opportunity if it was really what I wanted to do. As I continue to realize, she was right. I enrolled at Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and immediately set out to understand how I could learn as much as possible about pursuing my own search fund.  

In life at times, I think it's sometimes better to be lucky than good. While at Kellogg, I got very lucky. I met an "older" searcher named Chris Hendriksen, who (1) had acquired a business called VRI in Dayton (my hometown), and (2) had actually worked for William Blair ~10 years before me - for the exact same bosses. Chris had been running VRI for the last seven years - he and his partner had been very successful with the business were looking to support an individual like myself who was trying to understand whether or not actually operating a business was what he or she wanted to do.  

To this point, it was all still just a theory:  While at VRI, I worked on a project supporting a manager. I ended up saving her about ~2 hours a day by the work we did together - itself a positive result. However, I really came to understand my belief was to be confirmed when she shared that she was a student at Penn Foster. In all my time at Vistria, I had never met a student at Penn Foster even though I spent the most time on it at Vistria. It was working on that project where I truly had a visceral gut punch and sense of clarity: "This is what my dad meant when he said 'We were building something.'"  I realized at that moment: my intuition that I wanted to operate in a business was right - the project I had worked on wasn't easy, but I had a serious sense of accomplishment that I had never before experienced - because I helped the employee. I know that if I am to be successful in, I am going to work hard - so I am looking to find something I can make a difference and enjoy working hard at.

Returning to Kellogg to finish my MBA, I was thankful that I raised enough money to support my search. Thankfully, I have the support of individuals not who are looking for a way to make the quickest profit or are pursuing a savvy private equity investment, but those who I had worked with previously: Marty, Kip the two founders of Vistria, Michael Miles, who I sat on the board of Penn Foster with, Michael Locke, the former CEO of Rasmussen, Inc. who I had also worked with while at Vistria, Mark Anderegg, whose exposed me to the idea of a search fund, and Chris Hendriksen, who gave me the opportunity of a lifetime to work at VRI and in supporting me as I reached out to others within the search fund community.

I want to make a difference in people's lives. I know that if you serve your employees and customers well - you can make that difference. I know what I'm doing is at times very unlikely, almost the opposite of shooting fish in a barrel - trying to find a business owner looking to step away from their primary day-to-day hassles, and trust me to step in,  but I believe in what I'm doing and hope to make a difference in employees and customers lives so to make an equal impact for my family.