E187: Why Holding Companies Beat Private Equity w/Matt Foran

What if Berkshire Hathaway were built today, with the best of technology and long-term thinking baked into its DNA? That’s the question Matt Foran and his team at StoicLane are answering—by doing it. In this episode, I speak with Matt Foran, co-founder of StoicLane, a holding company quietly building one of the most interesting portfolios in private markets. With over 70 acquisitions across four major verticals—accounting, PEO, appraisal and mortgage services, and vacation rentals—StoicLane now manages $300M in TTM revenue and expects $60M in EBITDA this year. But it’s not just the numbers. StoicLane stands out for its permanent capital structure, seller-friendly integration approach, and deep use of technology and AI to transform old-school industries. We dive deep into how Matt thinks about company building, permanent capital advantages, competing with PE firms, and the cultural flywheels StoicLane is creating as they scale.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Weisburd?

  So what is Stoic Lane?

• 0:02Speaker 01

  We are a holding company focused on real estate and small business service rollups, where ultimately we are bringing a degree of technology to these firms, such that over a long period of time, we can transform those organizations, integrate them correctly, build technology in a way where we actually generate investment return and build better solutions for our clients.

• 0:31David Weisburd?

  Give me a sense for what the business is at scale today.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  We have acquired 71 companies, so that spans four verticals. We are the 70th largest accounting firm in the US, the 35th largest PEO, the fifth largest appraisal and mortgage services company, and the second largest vacation rental property management firm. In total, those firms represent roughly 300 million of TTM revenues, and we expect to generate about $60 million of EBITDA across those verticals this year.

• 1:10David Weisburd?

  You have a very unique holding company structure. Tell me about your holding company structure and how that helps you as investor.

• 1:17Speaker 01

  Stoic Lane is built with a C corp on top and LLCs below. Our investors have put money into that C corp. They buy shares and we deploy that money into our verticals in LLCs for each different business. What it means for the companies that we are buying and our message and what we drive ourselves towards is we expect to own these companies forever. And that's a really important message, vision. It's how we line up our incentives and ultimately it's how we behave. So with an idea that this isn't a three or five or seven year flip, what we go to market with in each of our verticals is a message to sellers

• 2:03Speaker 01

  that we are going to create a long-term durable firm with their company. So as an example, in our vacation rental business, we have acquired 26 companies.

• 2:16Speaker 01

  When we started in that space, we stood up on a stage at their association with three other roll-up firms and told a very different story. What we said to them is, we expect to build the best company in the US. It is going to take time. We respect the legacy of what they've created. We don't expect to disrupt their businesses dramatically. We have a path for those sellers to participate in the business, both operationally as well as economically.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  And ultimately, we will build the most reputable organization that exists. And we can do that because we expect to be a part of this permanently. If you contrast that to the folks sitting to our side, they were talking about how quickly they would bring in a bunch of firms, tie them together, and flip them. For someone who spent, and I'll give you an example of a gentleman from Lake Tahoe. He spent 21 years building his firm. He's on the local tourism board. He's a part of the community. Every person who works there is a great friend of his. And he knows every single homeowner. He knows every single guest. He can tell you about their family.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  He is a true hospitality genius. He didn't want to sell to anybody else. All of those firms had called him regularly. When we had a conversation with him, it was simple. We want you to be a part of this long term. We will absolutely keep your brand. We are excited for the business that you've built, and we want to continue that forward. And for that reason, he decided to sell to us. And that story repeats again and again and again. That was our first acquisition in that space. And by deal four, we had lived up to our commitments and what we said on that stage, and there was proof of it.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  So if you take the legacy piece of what these sellers want to protect, plus the predictability of our process, and add to it the knowledge that we're looking to do this for a very long period of time. It gives us an incredible advantage with a particular part of the market that we're looking to acquire.

• 4:32David Weisburd?

  Tell me about your background and the background of the overall Stoic team.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Stoic was created by three of us. Our backgrounds are predominantly in fintech, real estate, and insuretech. So we've built multiple startups, we've run large organizations. And as a part of all of those, we have a very high bend towards technology deployment. So that includes, I think, across our core team, we've probably launched at least 10, if not 15 startups. Many of them have led to exits. And as a part of that, it has taught us a degree of pragmatism on how technology works.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  So what we focus on at Stoic is taking highly fragmented businesses. Where our technology edge comes in is the ancillary pieces that create a lot of value. So we are very comfortable with core systems. We are the lead partner or the best-in-class partner for Prism and PEO, for Escapian Vacation Rental, for CCH in accounting. And what we expect to do in each one of those is build a great architectural relationship with those platforms as well, gain access to APIs that others don't have, or systems,

• 5:57Speaker 01

  schemas, data, architecture, et cetera, and build on top of it in ways where we can provide better customer service, higher quality of processes, more efficiency internally for our operations team.

• 6:09David Weisburd?

  So you alluded a little bit about your advantages versus private equity in terms of keeping the legacy brand alive. What other advantages do you have directly competing against private equity firms on deals?

• 6:21Speaker 01

  The simple answer is the long-term nature of what we provide, both in terms of decision-making, execution, time to integrate, and the treatment generally of all folks involved as a part of that. Resonate with the seller group that we're pursuing. So if you look at the targets that we focus on, again, highly fragmented, owner operated, usually a lifetime to build. It is a group of people who assign very high value to the treatment of their employees,

• 7:00Speaker 01

  to the behaviors of how clients are handled, to how they operate within their community. And that permanent piece allows us to execute a series of tasks with a bit more nuance and a duration that is unique. I lived through selling my startup to a private equity firm. It was an incredible team. To this day, still think they're one of the best set of operators I've ever worked with. However, the speed at which they had to make change to our organization and to the

• 7:40Speaker 01

  other acquisitions that I watched them make, really was based on timeframes that we don't have constraints on. So I think that's one part. It's duration and the ability to take steps differently that protect key employees, key client relationships, and allow us to participate in the vendor ecosystem in a way that's unique.

• 8:06David Weisburd?

  Just to play devil's advocate, you mentioned you were previously acquired by private equity firm and they executed at a blazing fast pace and I'm sure cut people, cut vendors, you know, the traditional private equity playbook. Isn't that what you need in order to get the good multiples and high IRR? How are you able to avoid that and still achieve the financial outcomes?

• 8:32Speaker 01

  That's a great question. And I don't think it has to be one or the other. But what I have seen, and I'll stay on the vacation rental example. There's a firm in our space called Vacasa, which is an incredible firm with great people that has a really powerful story. But they did move at that speed with those decisions with a playbook that you would expect. And ultimately, what it looked like is they would go in, buy a firm, exit

• 9:02Speaker 01

  top of the house management, change the technology, change the brand, move a very high percentage of the roles into centralized locations. And ultimately, it disrupted the ability to deliver services on a local level. They lost the local knowledge, the local relationships. They traded, you know, brand towards, you know, something that didn't have brand recognition. And these companies, you go to the Cape, and some of these firms have had three generations of families traveling to them. They know that company. That's the only place they call.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  It just doesn't work in that space. So there are certain decisions that you make in transformation of these companies that with a three-year timeframe aren't possible. For us, they are. We do expect over time that some of these pieces that traditionally get handled by private equity will really have to take place. But it's once you really appreciate the nuance, once you've really built the right infrastructure around it and had the time to execute those changes correctly. So I think it's on a business by business basis. Again, I don't think it is, one is necessarily better than the other, but in the areas where we focus with the types of sellers that we deal with, with the

• 10:23Speaker 01

  types of businesses that we're operating, our model is exceptional. There are other places in our accounting firm, as an example, where we move much quicker. It makes more sense to move on technology. There will be a singular brand in that space. And in that company, which is called Archer Lewis, it is an organization that will be the preeminent SMB, tax, payroll, bookkeeping, and ultimately, you know, other types of services firm. And that company is moving quickly on tech. They're moving quickly on brand. And there are a number of other changes that they're making where it just makes more sense in that specific area.

• 11:02Speaker 01

  And the long-term vision of that firm is cutting out a strata of the industry where the big four really focus on the large organizations. You have H and R Block and others who focus on personal. Archer Lewis will be the brand for SMBs. And we feel there's no reason to slow down the path to that existing.

• 11:26David Weisburd?

  I've never met a private equity firm that didn't say they didn't have proprietary deal flow. I've probably had hundreds of conversations.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 11:33David Weisburd?

  But I've double clicked on some of your deals and you do actually have non-bank deals in quite a few, if not the majority of your deals. How do you get sellers to avoid an auction and to sell directly to you on a vis a vis a one-to-one transaction?

• 11:49Speaker 01

  It comes back to delivering on our commitment to these sellers. I think that's the easiest answer, but the detail behind that is important. So when we stand up on a stage and explain what we're looking to achieve with our businesses, I think it resonates. If I spent half my life building my company and I heard that the outcome of the sale would be that, you know, what I have created will persist indefinitely with a predictable team behavior.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  And I get to continue to participate in it. It's more attractive to me personally than perhaps sheer economics. And we've seen this a number of times. So one part is what the vision of what we're trying to create. The second part is as we get into these sectors and actually transact, we treat people with a high degree of respect. We

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Are incredibly transparent. We spend a lot of time with the brokers in the space, with the leaders in the space, and we explain exactly what we're doing. When we got into Vacation Rental, we invited our competitors, the key players, the brokers, all out to dinner together, and told them exactly what we were going to do. And we've done exactly that. So as we drive forward through Deal 5, Deal 6, Deal 7, and people see that we're doing exactly what we told them we would do, plus you get a year behind you and the sellers have made it through that transition period. It's usually chaotic in the beginning, but as you get through, you know, a few months,

• 13:34Speaker 01

  few reps working together, they absolutely become our sourcing team. They all have friends in the industry. These are collaborative spaces. Accounting, you know, you don't really compete with someone who's 20 miles down the road. Same thing with Vacation Rental, same thing with PEO. So these folks work together across different geographies to help deliver better service, to help identify better people to have on their team. And when they sell their company, inevitably, any person that they've worked with in the past will ask them how it's going. And the answer is, it's going well. Surely not perfect, but the future is what they hope to achieve for their team,

• 14:19Speaker 01

  for their clients, for their community. And what that results in is we get phone calls regularly from people who have talked to our sellers. We have sellers who will actively reach out to friends who they think would be a good fit for us. Our first MSP deal came from a person working in one of our companies, calling a friend and telling them, "Look, I think you have a great company. I think you're building something that will be very valuable, but for you to get to the next level, I think you should sell your company to Stoic Lane." Which is absolutely incredible. So we see that sort of interaction happening repeatedly.

• 15:02David Weisburd?

  I want to double click on something subtle about your business model, about the holding company model. One is every seller ends up being a shareholder in the ultimate holding company. So there's this kind of startup-like equity in the holdco that really incentivize people to go on and get other people to get acquired by the holding company, therefore increasing their value. Also, there's this interesting aspect that you see in a lot of very top, call it top 1% tech companies where the culture becomes so great that the startup employees become these bastions of the culture and go out and advocate for it. Whether or not it's driven by the equity, people just like to be around to have other

• 15:47David Weisburd?

  excellent people within the organization. I think that that's powerful as well. And that just accrues to any great organization, whether employees have equity or not, just excellence in itself is inspiring and excellent people want to work with other excellence.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  So maybe a few versions of this, just to give you a full appreciation of it. So when we talked about the structure of Stoic,

• 16:13Speaker 01

  on paper, it sounds simple. C corp at top, LLCs below.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  In reality, the incentive structures that go along with that are more complex and iterative. So at Stoic, there's not a single employee that doesn't have ownership in the company. Stoic management collectively is the largest shareholder of Stoic, both on an invested basis, but also on a common grant basis.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Our incentives are based on multiple of invested capital. So for all of the employees of Stoic, we are rewarded by essentially achieving 5X Moic on our investors' capital.

• 16:54David Weisburd?

  What's the timeframe on that?

• 16:55Speaker 01

  We have to be essentially at 5X for three years in a row in order to achieve the highest value within our equity. As a part of that, we have no fee, we have no carry.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  So it is us very much aligned with our investors' interest. Below that, in each one of our verticals, our leadership teams have management incentive programs that are tied to the performance of those companies in very similar ways. When we purchase a firm, on average, nearly every seller has rolled roughly 10% of the value into the business. So we have strong alignment from top all the way to bottom in terms of exactly what you described. We have a set of employees, sellers, team members, who all are looking to deliver the greatest degree of value creation for our shareholders.

• 17:53David Weisburd?

  Do you guys run like a reverse references process? Have you guys operationalized that?

• 17:57Speaker 01

  I wouldn't suggest that we have come up with a really strong operational process for it, but we do reward referrals. It's understood when we acquire a firm and a mention of that is discussed, where we tell our sellers, if you bring a deal to us and we close, we will find a way to provide you economics. So we have done that. It is a great way of rewarding someone for bringing an opportunity to the table that we likely would not have seen otherwise. Over time, I would expect that to continue to grow.

• 18:38Speaker 01

  So with 71 firms in three and a half years, the number of potential advocates, as you call it, just continues to grow. And I think across 71 companies on a seller basis, almost every one of those folks would be a promoter of what we are doing. We have certainly had a few moments where the relationship is imperfect. It's usually known at close. It's folks who want to sell and leave quickly. So there are a few people who have exited the business and we haven't had an ongoing relationship with them. I think they would still suggest that we're great people and treated them exactly as we expected.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  But the majority of the people who we have brought into Stoic. We'd stand on a stage and speak our praises and it's because they've done a great job.

• 19:33David Weisburd?

  You guys seem to have this culture of really delivering on what you say you're going to do, which is extremely differentiated and anyone in business for several decades will understand this. I want to really unpack on how that actually plays out, both in year one, year five, year 10. And is there a compounding aspect to it?

• 19:52Speaker 01

  So I think we actually see the benefit of this within 12 months. And it's in different versions at different time periods. But the deliver on your commitments or live up to your handshake is the way that I've always kind of described it.

• 20:10Speaker 01

  Let's go back to the Tahoe example because I think it's a crystal clear one.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  We acquired that firm in January of 2022 and everything we wanted to do went off the rails pretty quickly. And I mean that in all the best ways. And we sat down with the two leaders of that firm and literally apologized, said, hey, you know, all the things that we thought would go really well here, we're struggling. And this was probably two months in, we had issues with payroll, we had issues with

• 20:43Speaker 01

  payment processing, all these things that are really basic back office items. We weren't delivering on their behalf in the way that we had committed to them.

• 20:52Speaker 01

  We were very clear about it, very transparent, and we were accountable to them in terms of we made commitments, we failed, here's what we're doing about it. I would suggest within three months, we had turned that around. We were starting to pick up steam, we had learned exactly how the systems, the tooling worked. And we brought really great people to the table behind it and started to deliver. So I think the part that you're describing is a bit of a trough or what we jokingly call the J curve, where we needed a bit of time to understand, to learn and to bring value to our sellers in excess of what they brought to us. So six months in, we found our stride, we started to pick up steam. By the end of the year,

• 21:38Speaker 01

  we were delivering exactly what we said we would. We had taken a lot of the back office headaches away from the team, things that they really didn't want to spend time on. We had brought really talented people into the organization and they were helping in areas that traditionally these firms don't excel, not because they're not great at it, but just they weren't running at scale. And, you know, as a part of all of that, we continued to be very transparent in where we were creating wins and where we continued to struggle. So I think the first year was absolutely a challenge. By the end of the year, we were on the right footing. You could see the trajectory. You could see that thing,

• 22:20Speaker 01

  the flywheels were starting to move, albeit slowly. By 18 months, they were humming.

• 22:25David Weisburd?

  Like Berkshire Hathaway, you guys have a tax advantage to your structure. Tell me about the tax advantage, both for sellers who are selling into the structures and also your co-investors in the structure.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  There are two parts. The first part, when we created Stoke, when we think about permanent, it was one part how we operate and how we build businesses and how we're accountable for a long period of time. But that also creates a high degree of efficiency when it comes to taxes. So we looked at a 30-year period. If you had two firms identical in performance of us versus a traditional LPGP structure, how would that look for an investor? And because there isn't a responsibility or requirement to turn the funds over every approximate 10 years, we think it is a substantial difference in

• 23:19Speaker 01

  long-term value creation for those investors. I think our mark was something like a 26 time delta over that 30-year period. So the first part is for investors, they don't have to redeploy or reinvest. And those two to three points in time where cash doesn't have to come out and be redeployed matters a lot. We also recycle the cash within our companies.

• 23:47David Weisburd?

  And just to double click on that, so the redeploying, it's not just, just not just a taxable aspect, and it's not just a, you don't have to make another decision, it's also the J curve. You don't have to wait for another three-year deployment cycle where your money's not at work. I think private equity has something like two-thirds kind of deployment. So you commit to 100 million, on average, 67 million across the life of the fund will be deployed. So you don't have that cash drag on a third of your capital.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  That's absolutely right. We will have drags as we move a lot of cash out of these businesses into future verticals. So we do expect to create a new vertical every 18 to 24 months. So it's not to say that we are perfectly efficient. But we do like the idea of getting through that J curve, building a lot of value, getting that compounding, and not having to walk away. So I'll give you two parts to that. One is Al, my co-founder, started a company when he was 23. He had $3.5 million of invested capital. They sold it three years later for $250 million. Incredible outcome. If you look at that firm today, it's

• 25:02Speaker 01

  called Anova. It's publicly traded. It's generating north of $450 million of EBITDA a year. So incredible outcome for the investors, incredible outcome for the team. And it's not to say that they would have played it exactly the same to achieve where it is today. But they had a lot of headroom above them. They'd created a really great company that had an incredible future ahead. And they exited the business, moved on. Had they just held on to it, it would have been substantially greater in terms of absolute and on a percentage basis returns.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  So as you get through that J curve and you have the opportunity to really build upon what is a great firm, we can run that indefinitely and in a way that continues to compound. And I think the second part to that is you're seeing firms recognize this more and more. I think if you go and research how many continuation vehicles are being built, it's a reflection of this. It could also be a point about liquidity, availability and exits and other things. But I think there are a number of really brilliant private equity firms who have seen that some of the more recent strategies can benefit from more time. And they're building vehicles to execute against that.

• 26:26David Weisburd?

  There's a couple of aspects of this kind of permanent, this trend towards permanent or evergreen structures. One is, as you mentioned, paradoxically, investors both want the ability to take out money. Typically, it's within five years instead of 10, it could be 12, 14 years for venture capital. And two is they also don't want their money out sooner than they want it because of this taxable aspect. So you kind of could have your cake and eat it too. And then there's this interesting fee compression. So these evergreen structures have lower fees, but in some models actually have higher equity value for the underlying management company because they're evergreen investors. Think of it as episodic customers for a SaaS company versus recurring customers.

• 27:09David Weisburd?

  The recurring customers, the evergreen customers are actually worth more to the underlying manager. So there's this kind of like win-win aspect from that as well.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  We see that very similarly in the way that you described it. And I think for our approach,

• 27:30Speaker 01

  the tax advantageous piece, the timing, when we talked about structure earlier, considering all those items, it's rather complex. So when you know, you think about liquidity and the point you just made about timing of investors in private equity and the, you know, the path to getting their cash out at exactly the right time period. That is a very tough needle to thread.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  If you look at the availability of liquidity that we are creating for our investors, we expect them to participate very long term. That's how we built the organization. That's how we structured. That's what our goal is, but we do expect that there may be some who need cash out for different reasons. And for that purpose, when we talked about liquidity earlier, us providing a share buyback path, we think will achieve that outcome. So as we start to build a lot of cash in our business, inevitably, there will be shareholders who will say, you know, for one reason or another, it's my time and I either need to exit some part or all of my investment on an annual basis as we grow and have availability cash for that

• 28:40Speaker 01

  purpose. We expect to provide an annual offer to repurchase those shares.

• 28:45David Weisburd?

  We'll get right back to interview, but first, we're looking for the next great guest. If you or someone you know is a capital allocator and would make for a great guest, please reach out to me directly at [email protected]. So you sent me over some AI that you're deploying within your companies. And I know we can't get into that specific use case. It's proprietary, but I just saw a post by Robert Smith from Vista talking about how AI is electricity and they're deploying into every single company in their portfolio. What ways are you deploying AI within your rollups?

• 29:17Speaker 01

  We very much agree with the comment of it being electricity. So for us, we have, as we discussed earlier, a pretty strong background in technology. And we see AI to be similar to all other forms of what technology has offered organizations in the past. So we're highly pragmatic about it, but we use it everywhere. So as a starting point, we think about a set of objectives that AI should achieve. That includes employee upleveling, process optimization, quality control improvement, and a series of other changes that it should

• 30:01Speaker 01

  ultimately provide. As a part of that, what's particularly unique about AI today?

• 30:08Speaker 01

  Versus other forms of technology is simply its availability. So historically, open source libraries of Python, really incredible, changed the world, similar to cloud computing. And you can go through a list of advancements that have allowed for startups to grow faster, cost less money to launch, et cetera. AI is something that everybody can touch. It means it's highly iterative. It means that it's highly accessible. It means that really kind of getting engagement and adoption is much simpler. But you have to have folks who know how to build around it.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  So if you think about employee upleveling as an example, we have deployed a series of tools, agents, that connect to Slack where the source of information that they use to provide guidance is constrained as a way of avoiding inaccurate answers. So the folks in our P E, P E O, who work on very complex payroll questions, very complex 401K, healthcare questions are able to essentially enter a question into Slack.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  A series of bots are reviewing and sourcing information from Prism Guides, which is the technology that they run on, or local laws on PTO, or changes in 401K regulation, and providing them answers back so that they can be more valuable to our end clients.

• 31:52David Weisburd?

  I think that's a very underrated aspect of AI, the consumer sandbox. So if you had an organization of 100 people and one person knew how to use Python, all the ideas of the company for how to use Python and use You know, machine learning had to come from that one individual versus now if you have 100 people, they don't necessarily have to code in Python and they don't even have to come up with the end case of how to deploy it. They could just make certain queries to find out whether it makes sense to invest in a technological solution. So this consumer sandboxing, I think is underrated. Somebody was telling me about a cost segregation studies for real estate investment. I just, you know, went on perplexity and did a whole

• 32:33David Weisburd?

  AI Q and A, not because I was going to use that to create a cost segregation study, but I wanted to know whether I should pay a law firm 10, 20 K to do that. I think there's this interesting kind of exploration aspect of AI that's not, not fully appreciated.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  And the appreciation of it, that's a really critical piece. We, some time back, had our legal team write an AI use policy that aggressively focused our organization on its usage. And coming from our legal team, you can appreciate their degree of conservatism and appropriate risk management in the use of these tools with PII and everything else that's mission critical. But coming from our legal team, they are using these tools. It is something that with the right people, to your point about, I think, accessibility,

• 33:31Speaker 01

  we have folks like Mary who runs our finance team in our vacation business, or Aaron who's running a big chunk of our MSP. These are folks who can write Python, who can write SQL queries that actually work, who have tech backgrounds that we have recruited to Stoic, back to that point of what makes us unique.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  They are all technologically savvy and have an ability of going a layer below most. But they're in operating roles and they're in finance roles and they're in legal roles. And they have an appreciation for these systems, tools and capabilities. Uh, but to the point about what, why AI is perhaps unique. To your exact point about perplexity, it is right at your fingertips. So if you have the ability of understanding the connectivity to a layer below on a systems basis, and you can quickly ping away at any one of these platforms and ask it how to make those connections and uh, answer advanced questions.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Uh, you can really build some powerful tools in time periods that historically were impossible.

• 34:48David Weisburd?

  Preparing for this interview, I did some research and saw that there's really only three well-known organizations like Berkshire, IAC, Coke, that really deployed this type of model. Why aren't more people using holding companies in order to acquire companies?

• 35:03Speaker 01

  It's a great question. So I have a few answers. Um, my first would be there are more people pursuing this structure than there have been historically. And I think that's a recent uh phenomenon. Uh, you probably have to have three things for this to work. The first is you have to have the right people. We have a track record of building companies, creating a lot of value for shareholders, uh, executing deals in ways that are very complicated and nuanced. Uh, and we have a few edges in terms of network of really talented people,

• 35:44Speaker 01

  technology and a few other advantages that maybe some others do not. You have to have a vision, so I think you have to go at this today with a very strong position that this is permanent, that this is greenfield, that this is long duration and uh, you have to commit to how long that actually uh, requires you to be a part of this organization, which uh, for me is permanent as well. Lastly, I think the highest hurdle is the capital piece.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Getting investors to commit to a structure like this from day zero is very difficult. If you look at the examples of what you stated, many of these I don't think were meant to be permanent, or they wouldn't have said that day zero.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Danaher is a great example of this. I think they had a very unique situation that allowed them to have capital to do their first deal. Berkshire, everybody's researched, Berkshire knows the details, the history.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Even IAC, there are organizations that had a unique entry point, got a few wins behind them, and it afforded them the ability to move it forward to a position that gave them duration unique to others. And I think that last piece, that last hurdle, is so challenging to get over that there are very few people who can get the approval of investors in capital to have that mandate. So I think that's probably the hardest part, which is obvious. But I do expect that there will be more organizations pursuing this path.

• 37:31Speaker 01

  And I think it's evidenced by what we discussed earlier, which is the continuation vehicles. I think more companies, people, leaders, financial

• 37:43Speaker 01

  financial minds are seeing where the compounding piece of really great companies provides higher returns over longer periods. And they're finding technical paths to it, whether that's at the onset or later in the process of what they've built. The part that's really challenging-

• 38:04David Weisburd?

  Well, this has been a masterclass on using holding companies to buy private assets. As you mentioned, I think there's going to be much more of these. What would you like our listeners to know about you, about Stoic, or anything else you'd like to shine a light on?

• 38:19Speaker 01

  Oh, I appreciate that. We have an incredible organization that attracts really great talent. And we're always looking for amazing leaders in our businesses. We would love to talk to really talented people to pursue our strategy with us. We have an investment team that's done 71 deals in three and a half years. If you're looking to participate in an organization that closes deals, we've got it.

• 38:47David Weisburd?

  And maybe a dumb question, but you made a call for talent. Is that the constraint that you see in most top organizations? Is that if they had more talent, the other constraints would would go away?

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Yes, the easy answer is yes.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  You had a great executive coach on a while ago. I think his name was Alexis. And he was, yeah, I, that was an incredible episode. And part of his statement about great people is a multi problem.

• 39:22David Weisburd?

  The ability to solve multi multi step problems.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Yes. And, and you know, you hear something like that said so simply. And it, it's so clear after you hear it out loud.

• 39:35Speaker 01

  What we focus on, what we are responsible for around execution is that every day of the week. And finding people who meet that definition is an advantage to any company. And I'm very excited by the fact that I think we have that type of person in spades across everything we do.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  But it's exciting to find more people with that skill and bring them in. And to your question of, is that the constraint? I think it is because no matter the problem, if you have people who can unlock those opportunities, and we have it in every one of our businesses, you can achieve outcomes that.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Otherwise wouldn't exist. So I, I, I think the answer is simply yes.

• 40:34David Weisburd?

  There, there's another term, Leila Hermosy, Alex Hermosy's wife, and I've been trying to schedule her for a podcast. She's, she's amazing. She runs Alex Hermosy's business. And she talks, she has this term called barrels, which are basically people that could roll onto themselves. So people that take something essentially like mini CEOs that could go on and solve tasks and self basically know what to prompt themselves on what they need to do, like basically create mini businesses. That's really what scales an organization, not necessarily even great reports or great VPs of this, but people that could create the task, bring resources internally around that task, maybe a business plan, or maybe just a operating document and just execute that. That's what she sees as a constraint.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Similar to the Alexa's comment, that, that's such an obvious thing as you say it out loud. And if you look at what we are constructing with accounting, with PEO, with MSP, the intersection of those capabilities provide a very large client set of, you know, SMBs that have similar needs. And we already have, you know, a massive number of organizations who need other services and you have someone who's a barrel. They can prioritize it correctly,

• 41:57Speaker 01

  and they're willing to go step out on the edge and take a risk. And that's, that's a pretty unique skill set. So yes, I do think in everything that we do, it's going to come down to talent.

• 42:11David Weisburd?

  Well, Matt, thanks. Thanks for your time and I look forward to sitting down, continuing the conversation soon.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Thank you so much.

• 42:20David Weisburd?

  Thanks for listening to my conversation. If you enjoyed this episode, please share with a friend. This helps us grow. Also provides the very best feedback when we review the episode's analytics. Thank you for your support.