Enduring Ventures

“Enduring Ventures has turned out to be pretty big. It's a hundred million dollar plus company now.”

“The next thing we do, let's reverse engineer. What is the last business we would ever want to work on? Right? Like, What is something that we would want to work on for the next 2030 or 40 years, which is really different from our startup experience”

“And so having an internal capital market means I don't need all the friction of going to a pool of investors and pitching them an idea and saying, here's how much you get and here's how much I get. And, or if I need debt, going to a bank and saying, okay, well…”

“Our C corporation has no employees. It's we actually even see, even I just get a salary from enduring consulting group, LLC, which is a subsidiary.”

“So for example, we don't have any debt that is guaranteed by the parent company. That's very important because then If business A, for some reason has a catastrophic failure, it doesn't take down the rest of the ship.”

“Despite having had that really clear message from him, we almost immediately went, oh, it'd be nice to have a recruiter on our team. Let's hire a recruiter. And then sure enough, what happens, she was a perfectly good recruiter, but then the CEOs start losing …”

“Buffett has a view that basically it's his job to allocate capital and nobody else's. And I think there's a world where you can train your management teams to also be buyers of businesses in their sector and to Smartly allocate capital”

“Xavier and I, you know, relative to maybe a year ago, we're still investing. We're still looking at opportunities, but we're happy to be patient for another three to six months to see where kind of the world lands, where everything resets and then pick up the …”

“So all of our original investors along with me and Cieva have that treatment in the company. And you do as well as an investor. I think about the first eight million that we raised qualified as QSPS.”

“In a weird way, local plumbing and HVAC is as much about internet marketing as it is about the toilet.”

“And the one we looked at in, in in the Midwest was doing about Four million of EBITDA. We could have bought it at, what was it Xavier? Maybe four times EBITDA at the time?”

“He bought like a Harley Davidson rental company in Hawaii, like the only motorcycle rental company in Hawaii, right? So he has monopoly on all motorcycles, if you want to rent one in the entire, on the entire island, and it just prints money.”

“So enduring is a long-term holding company. What we do is we buy cash flowing businesses at reasonable prices and we pair them with great operators and we run them and we hold them as a portfolio forever. That's our plan.”

“We are now owners of 12 businesses two of them or three of them actually are tech companies. We also have a venture studio, so we've started a couple of businesses, but 90% of what we do is we buy businesses that are generating cash flow from retiring owners.”

“We really like to buy at valuations that are three to five times cashflow. So if a business does a million dollars of cashflow per year, We really want, don't want to pay more than three to five million dollars to acquire it, and you really can't get that in m…”

“We've actually redirected our focus in tech to just focus on businesses like UpCouncil that have good revenue that don't quite have the profits to support it and that we can turn around and create a cashflow engine from them because in those situations we can …”

“We actually, we both live in California and we don't own any businesses in California yet. So they're all nationwide.”

“I actually recommend, at the very least, thinking about your sale process three years before you plan to do it, and ideally even four or five years if you're not in a rush, right, because you can really optimize your business for the sale”

“We do have QSPS designation for enduring ventures, which is a C corp and a holding company, and we are pretty strategic about making sure we set it up in the right way. Such that we could get that designation”

“If you're a year out or you're two years out and you've had zero profit this whole time, which many businesses do or negative profit, consider showing profit or considering structuring your business so that you can make it very clear to the buyer that these tw…”

“There's probably going to be more opportunities like up council and our other businesses. That's the VC fallen angels, the businesses that have raised a lot of capital, but maybe haven't grown into, haven't fully grown into the scale that they should be at. So…”