Chris Fredericks

Thanks to @ClintFiore I have quite a few new followers. To reintroduce myself, I lead @EmpoweredVen, a 100% employee-holding company, based in Carmel, Indiana. We are actively acquiring primarily industrial businesses in the Midwest today, but we are building a scalable model and intend to build a national, diverse employee-owned conglomerate. We buy with no intention of ever selling. Sellers love how we collaboratively work with them and secure the future for their business and employees. We are seeking leaders for future acquisitions. If leading an employee-owned company sounds interesting to you, please reach out. I think leading an employee-owned company feels like having the wind at your back due to aligned incentives. It’s fun! The employees of companies we acquire join our ESOP immediately and, over time, being an employee in an EV company is life changing. We enhance strong teams with an ownership culture and shared purpose. Financially, 10+ year employees have ESOP balances that are 5x or more their annual income. We are projecting that with fairly steady, solid performance, 25 years in our ESOP will result in 75-100% of retirement needs fully covered. (No guarantees of course.) Truly life changing financial security. In 2010, I led an ESOP buyout and became President of @tvf_inc, a leading textile supplier. TVF grew substantially and became the founding operating company for @EmpoweredVen. We have no investors. We finance growth with our balance sheet and very conservative financing. Here is our stock performance so far. I believe our journey is just beginning.

I'm sitting in a dark theater on Christmas Day in a small Texas town surrounded by my wife's family. Her two brothers, her dad, her uncle, her cousins. We finished opening presents and had leftovers for lunch. Now we're watching the new Timothée Chalamet movie, Marty Supreme, that's loosely based on a table tennis legend named Marty Reisman. I did not expect to leave this movie thinking about my own life. In the beginning I am rooting for Marty. He is a young hustler who doesn’t come from much. I see parts of myself in him. Mostly the good parts. The drive, the scrappiness, a pure manic focus. He feels like an entrepreneur fighting against the odds. In every other scene he’s trying to make money to pay for his next step. I know this feeling and I respect this hustle. I remember sitting alone in my 30s at Saigon Shack on MacDougal Street in New York City. You could find me every Friday and Saturday night at 10:15pm at the counter seat by the register. Drunk college kids stumbled around outside. People in their 20s and 30s were enjoying their date nights. Inside I was alone with my little leather briefcase and a bowl of beef pho. I was reading customer feedback forms from that night's museum tours. The staff started to recognize me after a few weeks. I would read every single survey and use the feedback to improve my renegade museum tours the next day. I was obsessed. When we were growing our family avionics business, I remember arriving at the office on Sunday mornings. I would open the warehouse alone and blast music because nobody else was there. I remember that feeling. It was thrilling. I was high on caffeine from black Waffle House coffee. I’d work away almost every Sunday of my 20s to help build the business. And I absolutely loved it. So when I watch Marty Supreme in that theater, always pushing, a maniacal obsession, I think that I understand him and I want him to win. But about an hour into the movie, something shifts. I can’t pinpoint it exactly but there’s a crack in the Marty character. Marty doesn't know how to find the off switch. His self-centeredness turns into scenes of pure destruction. He doesn't just hustle. He torches things. Ruins his friend's car. Abandons his lovers. I find myself shaking my head and almost covering my eyes. It becomes impossible to stay on his side. The movie feels a lot like Uncut Gems, which makes sense because it is the same director. It is stressful and fast-paced. The soundtrack drowns out the dialogue at times and adds to the anxiety. I expected a movie about ping pong. But it is more of a movie about someone incredibly driven who goes too far. The credits roll and we walk outside. Everyone is talking about the movie and how they liked or didn’t like it. I feel a bittersweet recognition but I don’t want to say it just yet. There are times when I feel that same pull that Marty in the movie felt. The obsession to win, or to solve a problem, or to not let go. I feel that sometimes with my new work endeavors. My Patron View donor database or my personal website projects. I feel it with the pace of AI evolving and wanting to keep up and everything pulling me in. My wife and I got married two and a half months ago. Sometimes she can tell that I'm not all there. That I’m thinking about something else and I haven't fully left work behind. I'm still fixated on a problem in my head while we're having dinner or walking the neighborhood. If I push too hard on my projects, I risk losing some of the relationships I've worked so hard to build over the last few years. I want to stay happily married. We’ll try to start a family soon. And I guess this is the tension that I see in Marty Supreme and I sometimes see inside me. Sitting in that theater with my new family up in the back row of the tiny Texas multiplex. I thought about what's on the other side of the obsession. And what might be worth slowing down for.

What if the most kind thing you can do for a loved one is to not hold them back or dissuade them from exploring, changing, evolving…

Pick winnable games. I didn’t come up with this but it’s a really important insight for leaders. Pro coaches don’t say “championship or bust” at the beginning of the year unless the team truly would consider falling short of that a complete failure for the season.

@Sam_Rosati Hard to pick but Shawshank

What’s the better movie: Shawshank Redemption or Good Will Hunting?

@joepohlen I thought it was too expensive

Anyone using Culture Index?

@markbrooks "I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best." - Oscar Wilde.

Beef Tartare: seasoned ground beef uncooked - pinnacle of fine dining. Your taste is impeccable. Hamburger: seasoned ground beef cooked - you're ordering that in a restaurant? Your taste is Americanized and low-class. What is the matter with you?

I had none of this growing up and am doing a fair bit of winning, praise be to God. America is still the land of opportunity if we can keep it out of the clutches of cronyism and communism.

@TKopelman @RosserJobs I agree with you about @alphaarchitect being a great person for that

@esopchris @RosserJobs Yeah, I was really hoping to get into the weeds and chat the tax planning and impact of various ways to sell your business

Who wants to come on my podcast and talk strategies for selling a business? With a focus on ESOPs

@RosserJobs @TKopelman Thanks Jon! Happy to chat sometime @TKopelman to see if I’m the right fit or I have some other people I could connect you with.

@TKopelman .@esopchris leads an ESOP and has been acquiring businesses. Not sure if those have been ESOPs prior to acquiring. Making connection here just in case.

Our economic policy is so, so strange and bad. A bizarre combination of hating trade and hating elites has led us to be furious about the fact our policies send low-value manufacturing work overseas ... while we target high-value science for destruction and send it overseas.

@StrongpointRich Great share, thanks Rich

One thing I know about myself is that I care deeply about how my team is led. When we were starting to add our first leaders a few years ago, I felt that I was at risk of becoming an overbearing leader of leaders - it's important to me, I have strong opinions on how it ought to be done, and it's inherently subjective. Perfect combination for a bad outcome. I have a particular leadership style. I wanted to ensure I was allowing for stylistic differences while still holding leaders to a non-negotiable standard. I sat down and wrote out a set of leadership standards. Two pages. With nearly two dozen leaders at various levels now, it's become the highest leverage cultural document we have. Every leader down to team lead and crew lead is introduced to this and has it consistently reinforced. Interviews center around this, onboarding has dedicated space for it, it leads off recurring meetings, annual reviews center around it, the maxims are spoken daily in our building and in 1:1s. It's just become what we're about. Here's a snapshot of a few of them:

The buses in Canada say they’re sorry a lot.

🤩

I have become abundance-pilled by @ezraklein and @DKThomp. Both political parties fail us with a scarcity mindset. On the left: degrowth, regulatory overreach, opposition to nuclear, and a fetish for rationing resources. On the right: economic protectionism, anti-immigrant policies, opposition to solar, gutting science programs, and nostalgia for a vanishing past. What we need is abundance! More housing to end shortages, more clean energy—nuclear, solar, geothermal—to power growth. Build big again: modern grids, bridges that don’t crumble, high-speed rail. Support American businesses—not with trade barriers, but by reducing red tape, incentivizing innovation, and opening doors to skilled immigrants who fuel our economy. Invest in education and R&D to keep us ahead, not just coasting on yesterday’s wins. Although Ezra and Derek lean left, the Abundance mindset isn't partisan - It’s the progressives dream of immigration and affordable housing, libertarians push for free trade and deregulation, conservatives love of American greatness—and a rejection of zero-sum thinking from all sides. Scarcity traps us all; let abundance set us free!

Which way, western man?

I'm excited to share our 2nd frontier film: Too Cheap To Meter Out now. Right here on X. x.com/i/status/19009…