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
So we started off in plumbing and HVAC and we had this, a guy named- It's always HVAC. Yeah, exactly. This guy, AJ Brown was a CEO in training. We put him in to be CFO of one of our companies. He did great there. We sold the business. We repatriated him. We said, okay, you're ready for prime time. They're going to be the CEO of a platform.
And then we paired him with another CEO in training that was just coming in, this guy, Will Mattson. So they become president and CEO or CEO and CFO initially. We picked HVAC. We had a little experience in that space. They were excited about that space. And then we started just going and visiting tons of companies.
And when you go visit 20 companies in the space, you learn more in one three-hour management visit than you do in three weeks in a conference room. And then what you're picking up in those meetings is what does great look like? And what's cool about it, each company probably does one thing great. The company does recruiting great.
This company does purchasing, training, marketing, IT systems they use and how sophisticated they are with them. But if you add that up across 20 companies and you grab every single piece of that playbook, you have the best playbook in the world. So you're starting to architect what does that look like before you even have bought a company. So we're hiring the CEO, getting the industry right.
We're getting part of the management team right. And then we're getting the playbook right before we've ever even written a check. Then we start going and buying companies. The first couple, we try to buy pretty small. I think our first deal here was $8 million of EBITDA. And we learned a ton. And we bought another one that was like two of EBITDA and building along the way.
And then we're also building our holdco. So we're building out the CEO, CFO, chief people officer. And that's the platform.
Yeah, the holdco is the platform. Our best companies, we've really overinvested early in those platforms. It's really expensive to do that. And we have platforms that are pretty young that have a $15 million hold co expense. But that's really your foundation going forward.
And where does that $15 million come from? That comes from the fund? Yeah, yeah. So you're just putting the money, capitalizing a new company. That's the...
But it's not quite that bad because we're pretty quickly buying companies that have EBITDA that we're using to fund the businesses. So they're cashflow positive pretty quickly. So this particular deal, one of the early things we figured out is, you said there's a lot of HVAC companies, but we figured out that every competitor in HVAC was doing the same thing.
They were buying the five to $10 million EBITDA business that had a great management team. They were all buying the same company. It turns out 90% of the market is below that and management wants to leave and cash out. And so we said, why don't we build a system to go buy that company? And that included talent, was a huge lever. So I give AJ and Will a ton of credit, but they tapped into...
the veteran market. They built their own CEO and training program because they came through with Alpine's program. And they said, this is amazing. The company's called Apex. They built their own Apex. One of the early people they brought through was this guy named Brad Schwartz. So his resume is West Point, Green Beret, Wharton Business School.
And he comes in to run this, I think, $8 million revenue business. And fast forward, he's running a $500 million division today. Oh my God. The business we initially bought was 40 million, I think, of revenue and 80 of EBITDA. This year, it'll do 3 billion of revenue. We haven't put any more equity in. They've just been accumulating these small little businesses.
So the business has gone from, we put in 50 million of equity. This year, it'll do 500 million of EBITDA and we put in no additional equity. And it's just been an exercise in just really having each business that we acquire putting in incredible talent. We rip out their IT systems and we put in a financial package, an ERP system, a business intelligence system.
And then every single company we buy has to literally input every job they do exactly the same so we can compare all the data across all the companies. And then we have a training school now for the military veterans. I think that we have 80 companies military veterans as general managers of that company. They've been phenomenal.
That's an example of starting literally with a blank piece of paper, which is how we do each thing. We form a pod of people to go assess a bunch of different industries. We design the playbook and then hopefully repatriate someone from our system into the leadership team. And we have a lot of the key decisions already made and evaluated.
We have plenty of time and patience before we ever have to wire money.
So if I think about if I step all the way back on like what service Alpine has and will render in the market, it's I have this visualization of decades of small businesses being built by the baby boom and Gen X generations or whatever. there's tons of them. I don't know how many there are, probably a gazillion HVACs alone. True for like every industry.
The problem is that there's nothing to do with them when those people want to retire. And basically your solution is solve that with talent. That was like the unique insight and thing that you've built up relative to other private equity firms or
Yeah. And I would say at a headline, it's solve it with talent. And underneath that is a whole bunch of intellectual property about how to make that person who goes into that company on day one be really successful. Because if you just change management, it's really hard and it can go really badly. We've learned that the hard way.
We have a lot of intellectual property on like, what does that CEO actually do on day zero and the first 30 days and 60 days and 90 days? We have intellectual property on the systems and how we're measuring it and literally how they're hiring. It is what you said, Patrick, but then underneath that, there's a lot of intellectual property about how to actually do that.
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