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
Without giving away all the secrets to us, can you give us like a flavor of that IP and like some of the things that you've learned?
I'll give you a couple of things. So first is we have about 30 coaches in our ecosystem that are versed in this playbook. And so they get paired up with this first-time CEO and they've been through it a lot of times and they're doing this specifically the Alpine playbook. So they can- Those coaches are full-time employees? They're 1099s, but they're probably spending 70% of their time on Alpine.
So they have that intellectual property. They're literally partnering with this first-time CEO and going through this first- six months of paint by numbers what they're going to do. But I'll give you an example. CEO walks in day zero. They make their big announcement. People are upset because Joe's plumbing, Joe's retiring. They've been working with Joe for 15 years.
Here's this 28-year-old that doesn't know the industry. They're not thrilled on day zero, which is understandable. The first move for the first 60 days is listen. They sit down with the key employees and say, hey, tell me about your role. What do you do here? What's going well? What else? What else? What else? What's not going well? What else? What else?
Hey, if you were me, what would you be focused on? What should the top priorities be? What are we working on that's a waste of time? What should I be worried about? What are the biggest opportunities we have right now? Biggest problems? They're going and doing that and they're meeting with, depending on how big the business is, they might be meeting with 20, 30 people in the business.
Without a doubt, without fail, one of the first biggest things people say is, I've worked here for 15 years and no one's ever asked me my opinion before. In a very short period of time, we're really- Fucking Joe. Yeah, exactly. We're really engendering trust. And then we're using that and we might say, hey, I heard that you're number one.
Hey, Patrick, I heard your favorite idea was that we're going to expand internationally. We're not going to do that this quarter, but we did hear it. You don't have to do everything they say, but they have to feel heard. So they do that with the employees. They do that with the customers. And then from that, they're kind of enrolling the top people and designing the plan. Here's what we got to do.
Here's what the low hanging fruit is. And usually the fruit is so low and it's so obvious when you get through that. I know because I did this. I took over a business at one point. I remember thinking, how did they not do all this stuff? They just talk to their own people. One of my executive coaches had this great quote, the answer is always in the room. You don't have to go hire McKinsey.
If you go hire McKinsey, they're going to go do what I just said. They're going to go interview your people and then repeat back what you just heard. And you do that with the customers as well. And then the customers will tell you about the product or the service or whatever.
Yeah. So I was going to say like one beneficiary, presumably this is the end customer. Like you're not going from 50 to 500 of EBITDA if someone's not happy at the end.
Yeah, 100%. Just work backwards. I think the two biggest underappreciated leading indicators of success are the net promoter score of the customers and the net promoter score of the employees. We go in and we measure the net promoter score of employees right when we buy the business. In other words, before we came in the business, how engaged and happy our employees were.
And then we measure every six months going forward. And we publish that across all of Alpine. And we hold CEOs accountable for two reasons. One is I think it is probably one of, if not the most important leading indicator of success for the business. And two, going back to being a force for good,
It's probably the thing I'm the proudest of in terms of the impact that we have is 40,000 employees are having an experience that they enjoy coming to work more, significantly more after we buy the business. And I just think about, okay, you're a single mom and you're working at a call center in one of our companies or something.
Before we come in, you know, maybe you're clocking in, you're clocking out. You're not that excited. You're spending half your waking hours doing this. Maybe the people don't know your name or whatever. And then how do you show up in your community?
And 70% of people, and this is true across any industries in the US, you can replicate this study, but 70% of people dislike their job or they're disengaged from their job right now today. And if we can flip that, you know, and have 70% of people feel really engaged, it's not just that it's good for business, but I think it makes a big difference in these employees' lives.
And so we take that really seriously. And it's something that it's probably one of the things I'm the proudest of, of all the things that we've done.
I want to come back and spend a lot of time on the... searching, selection, training of this young, talented 27-year-old that takes one of these things over, like what that whole system looks like. But before we do that, I just want to close the thinking on the financial outcome associated with this strategy of building one of these platforms.
So again, going all the way back to your 5x MOIC target objective function or whatever for the funds, what does that mean you need out of these platforms? Where does the return come from? Is it multiple expansion? Is it fundamental growth? Simply, those are the two simplest areas that can come from. How do you think about like what you need to get for one of these things to be a success?
So the way we think about it is we're underwriting typically an individual deal to a, let's say a three X net outcome. And that will typically not have multiple expansion. It'll have, you're buying the business, you're leveraging it with whatever the debt multiple, the company is, and then you're growing it. We should be able to get to kind of a three X three, five gross in five years.
So that's kind of our typical standard underwriting. Where the 5X comes into play is you have these asymmetric outcomes where things go right, organic growth kicks in better than you thought, and you can hold the business longer than you thought. You can kind of portfolio your manager, your way to a 5X through a bunch of getting on base and then good things happening.
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