Graham Weaver
speaker
351 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Graham Weaver’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
They were in the label printing business, which was a good business because label might cost a penny on a $5 bottle of shampoo, but it contains all the product information. So no one's going to wait. No purchasing manager is going to be a hero by saving a fraction of a penny on the label. Had very good predictable revenue. I missed two things.
One is you were really underwriting the underlying customers. You had to go a level deeper and look at how recession. So the companies in the Midwest, when a recession hit in 01, their clients got destroyed. The revenue went down significantly. That was the first thing I missed. The second thing was I didn't understand how important management was.
And this would become a huge part of our philosophy later on. The founder would retire and then the number two person was there. I just backed them and they were absolutely not backable. I wildly underappreciated how much the management team mattered. And I made that mistake three times before realizing I had made it.
So in the next one, next label business, the underlying customer, the biggest customer we had was Trader Joe's, which was just like the best customer ever in the early 2000s. They just grew 15%. Yeah, 15% a year every year. They paid in five days. They allowed their vendors to have great margins. So it was just, It was a home run deal. I owned it for 22 years and it paid. Oh, wow. Yeah.
I just sold it a couple of years ago, actually.
It paid dividends along the way. Thank God. So now you've got a successful deal under your belt coming out of business school. It sounds like, obviously, at this point, you would have said, this is the thing I want to do. Is that right? Or was there still searching to be done?
Oh, gosh. It was 100% what I wanted to do and I still chickened out. So if you'd asked me any time in the two years, I was like, I know exactly what I want to do with my life. As graduation starts approaching and all my classmates are getting jobs in private equity, I'm getting a little FOMO and I'm also scared. I take an interview, which turns into a job at an institutional private equity fund.
And I knew in my soul, it was not what I wanted to do. And I showed up and a little bit of me died the day I started. And I did that for a little bit of time. And then I actually had a close friend of mine around that time, around my age had passed away. I just took a little time off and I just realized, hey, when am I going to do the thing I really want to do if not now?
And so I walked in a couple of days later and quit. I didn't have anything to land on. I didn't have a fund. I didn't have investors. I didn't have anything, but I was like, I got to give this a shot.
It seems like so many of these stories, when they go this way, they start small and modest. SPVs or single deals or whatever. So is that how yours was chained together before Alpine? Totally, yeah. A bunch of single SPVs to buy one company, exactly. What advice would you give people that hear that and they're like, yep, that's what I want to do.
I want to find a company, put together money, make it happen, start to build a track record.
I'd say a few things. First is I'd say pick one industry. Don't go do three deals in three different industries because you're not really going to know that much. In my case, I had that fourth deal was successful because I had done three and learned what really mattered. So I'd say try to stay in the same industry if you can. Pick a good industry. Secondly, I'd say pay yourself.
Sounds really obvious, but I didn't do that. So that was part of the pressure that I had about why I didn't go do that full time. So carve out enough that you can live reasonably comfortably, even if that cuts into your total upside or something. Duration is more important over the long period of time. I made so many mistakes, Patrick, everything you could imagine.
But I also got in the game when I was 25. So I just sit around thinking about it, overthinking it. I got to get in the arena. That would be my third piece of advice is go get in the arena.
What did you learn about raising money for deals when you really didn't have a track record and you were 25?
Okay, I started off trying to sell my track record, which was a catastrophe because what I didn't realize is these people are seeing phenomenal track records. And then they're comparing me to that. I was on the plane in the Denver airport going to San Francisco to visit what would turn out to be my largest investor. And I read this little book and I don't remember anything else this book said.
It was a little book of selling, it was called. But they had this line that said, people buy the salesperson, not the product. And on the plane ride from Denver to San Francisco, I completely changed my presentation and was like, okay, I'm going to sell myself as someone that will figure this out and is going to be trustworthy, reliable, kill myself to make this work.
And that pitch landed a lot better than, hey, here's my three label deals. Yeah, yeah.
They just read that book at the right time. so then we fast forward to the chapter where now you have alpine you have a private equity firm you're starting to raise bigger and bigger funds what are like the foundational core beliefs of the business how it runs that are most distinctive from other firms of its type would you say
There's a number of them. The first one I would say is, what's your objective function? Our objective function is MOIC. We have a specific number we put on that. We're trying to do 5X on a fund. Have you done that historically? We've done 5X in our last four funds. We have it marked at 5X in our last three, and the fourth one is well on its way, yeah.
Showing 101–120 of 351 · page 6 of 18
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