John Seiffer

This is non-sense. PE only makes money when they make a company more valuable. Debt paydown is almost always a small portion of the return. While sometimes cost reductions make a company more valuable, generally business buyers are pretty smart. They aren't going to pay up for a business that has been stripped. They will pay up for business that show top line growth, shifts to segments with more recurring revenue, etc. Most PE investments focus on growth. The idea that PE isn't focused enough on the long term is truly wrong. Talk to anyone that has worked in a public company and there is intense focus on simply the next quarter. When they get to PE they are amazed at the focus on 3-5 years out. And BTW, even if we are going to sell in 3-5 years we also have to make investments so the next buyer has a good return in their 3-5 year hold after that. Way less short term focused. Should we focus on 10-20 years out? While this sounds good, many investments focused on those types of time horizons are just a waste of money. Who knows what the world will look like in 20 years. If an investment can't be justified over the next 5 years then most times it is just a bad investment. I am sure there are limited exceptions but I am very skeptical. The bottom line is PE only makes money if they build better businesses. Not every PE firm is successful and even the successful ones have deals that don't work. But there are also public companies and founder owned businesses that fail. The success and returns of PE suggest that overall they are building better businesses and that is good for society as a whole.

I shop my home, auto, boat, rentals, and umbrella insurance once every three years. There would be reasons I wouldn't do this. 1) I had a claim and the experience was great. Im paying for a smooth claims process. 2) A recent ticket on the driving record. Maybe my current insurance company doesnt know about this violation. 3) My home was custom and my insurance company was built for HNW. There is a big difference on how these claims are handled and the expertise of the company makes a big difference. 4) My family or friend was my agent. I'll overpay to give the people I love business. None of those things are true today. I put all of my information into an excel document, the basics that includes Name, DOB, DL #, Occupation, Education level. I compile all of the current policies I have. I then email this info to all the captive agents, those agents that only represent one insurance company, like State Farm. I then email it to one independent agent, those who represent multiple insurance companies. I dont black out my premiums, thats a waste of time, agents dont set the price. If anything, it motivates them even more to apply all discounts if they know you are a decent account with a good commission. When I get quotes back, I compare them all, and ask each agent if there are any discounts I qualify for that might not be on the quote. For example, you might be able to buy a term life policy that costs you $200 and the discount would be $500, but since you didnt ask for that and the agent didnt consider telling you about it, you need to ask about the possibility for discounts that could be relevant. If I didnt know what I was talking about, Id ask the agent to compare their quote to my current policy and tell me how the pros/cons of moving to them. Id get this in writing from them.

I became a student of the search fund model around 2017. Back then if you brought it up on the floor of an investment bank in Manhattan people had no idea what you were talking about. The only people I could find who knew the model were a handful of veterans scattered across a few b-schools and a small community of people quietly pursuing it. It felt like a niche worth knowing about. The data has been trickling in for a few years now and the picture in the US isn't flattering. Acquisition success rates are declining. A real percentage of people who raise a search fund never close a deal. Returns have compressed meaningfully over the last decade and given the self-reported nature of most of this data it's probably conservative. None of this is surprising when you think about what happened to the model. It started as a cottage industry. A small number of people figured out you could call on owner-operated businesses directly, build real relationships and buy something good before it ever hit a broker's list. That worked but then it became a conference circuit with well-known speakers, a recognizable curriculum and a fundraising playbook that almost anyone could follow. Now there are hundreds of active searchers running the same outreach sequences into the same pool of sellers and AI has made that even more frictionless. Every incremental searcher is competing for the same finite inventory of willing sellers at reasonable prices. What the data is really showing is that the model misdiagnosed where the difficulty sits. A few years ago, anyone in PE who knew the ETA space would tell you the same thing: if you find a good deal, the capital is there. That was true then and it's still true now. The hard part was never financing. It was finding a real business, getting a real owner to trust you with it and actually closing. A sourcing script and a credential don't get you there. The buyers who are going to do well in this market over the next decade aren't going to win on access to capital or a better sourcing script. They'll win because they can actually run the thing. Operators with real reps and real track records. That experience isn't something you credential into. The opportunity in smaller founder-owned businesses is real, but the model for capturing it is evolving.