Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
Building Businesses: Lessons from a Career of Wins & Losses 6-2-25
02 Jun 2025
In this episode, Scott Becker shares hard-earned lessons from building multiple businesses.
Full Episode
This is Scott Becker with the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. Again, before I get started, I am so thankful to our listeners, our sponsors, our guests, just having a tremendous run with the podcast, past 7 million downloads, and ranked really highly in the Apple list. Thank you so much. Today's discussion is building businesses lessons from a career of wins and losses.
So lots of wins, lots of losses. And I'm just going to go through about 10 points on this building businesses, wins and losses. The first background I'll give, I'll start with this. I've been involved in building two successful businesses. First, a healthcare media company known as Becker's Healthcare that became really successful with a great team and great leadership in several niches.
Second healthcare legal practice originally built in a specific niche and then grew into several other niche practices and areas as we got bigger and more successful. I've also served on the board of a company that sold for nearly a billion dollars. I've served on a couple other boards. Some of those were successful. Some of those were not.
I've had the chance by background to invest in venture capital and private equity funds, including with Andreessen Horowitz, one of the best known venture capital funds, incredibly successful people. I've also invested in several startup companies throughout my career. Some of those went well. Some of those went to zero. Zero is always a bad thing. I've started several businesses.
A couple of them have been very successful. A couple of them have completely failed or petered out. We've seen both of that. I've made lots of investments. Some have been successful. Some have been total disasters. In fact, some of the ones I thought were real wins ended up being real losers.
We'll talk a lot this afternoon about building teams, niches, and a lot more, and try and also give some of my most miscellaneous points that I love to talk about. So I hope you enjoy this. What we're going to try and do again is discuss common lessons from wins and losses. So the core concept I'll start with next is teams. Every success I've had has been built around building teams.
And every failure I had was really where I didn't make the effort to want to put in the time to seriously build teams. where I've served on companies' boards, and I'll just go through this real quick. One of the boards I served on early, a company called Ambulatory Surgical Centers of America, they had droves of brilliant people, a ton of A-plus leaders,
they ended up having huge success for a long period of time.
Similar example, Physicians Endoscopy ran by a gentleman, Barry Tanner, significant success over a very long period of time and really succeeded with that team and that growth, ultimately sold to, went through several different private equity funds over the course of 25, 30 years, and then finally sold to Optum United for some crazy amount of money.
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