Episode 70: Mason Myers of Greybull Stewardship on
Building Foundational Growth in Pre-Mid-Market Portcos
On this episode
Shiv interviews Mason Myers, Founder and CEO at Greybull Stewardship.
In this episode, Mason explains why Greybull Stewardship focuses on pre-middle-market companies and the steps they take to set these companies up to be true middle-market companies primed for PE backing. Learn how they take companies under $5M in EBITDA and grow them organically, first by building foundational work like adding the right software and building the team, before they can begin to see the value creation payoff.
The information contained in this podcast is not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, investment advice.
Key Takeaways
- About the origins of Greybull and why they focus on pre-middle-market companies (and what that means) (3:04)
- Understanding the similarities and differences between businesses in different industries that are at the same stage (8:46)
- Why 100-day plans aren't a good fit for pre-middle-market companies (13:47)
- The strategic trade-offs needed to get to the next stage, like saying no and shifting focus (16:56)
- Key considerations when opting for a longer hold time to build foundational elements of a company (18:54)
- Leveraging inorganic growth levers like M&A and debt (23:03)
- What to focus on when growing a pre-middle-market company and how to prioritize those initiatives (26:05)
- The importance of getting the foundational elements in place before value creation can truly start, and cultivating a culture of patience with partners and founders (31:04)
Resources
- Greybull Stewardship
- Connect with Mason on LinkedIn
- Email Mason
Click to view transcript
Episode Transcript
Shiv: Alright Mason, welcome to the show, how's it going?
Mason: It's great. It's great to be here. Nice to see you in person, Shiv.
Shiv: Yeah, likewise and super excited for this conversation, especially given how different your approach is at Greybull. So why don't we start there? Give your background and what led to you starting the firm and what's really unique about your approach.
Mason: You bet. Well, maybe I'll just set the table with the Greybull thing real quick and then go to my background. At Greybull, we focus on what we call pre-middle market companies. So these are companies that we define as less than 25 million in enterprise value, less than 5 million in EBITDA usually. And our focus is to really make them better companies, strengthen them and then help grow them so they become like true mid-market, private equity backable companies. And the way we came to that strategy, I think really starts with my background as an operator, an entrepreneur, an owner operator of this size and type of business growing into the middle market.
But real quick, I was born in Greybull, Wyoming, which is where the name Greybull Stewardship comes from. My family moved to Omaha, so I have a fair amount of Berkshire Hathaway influence in what I try to do. My dad was a newspaper person, so I wanted to be a newspaper person when I came out of college. This was in the early 90s. I realized the internet was going to blow that up. So I moved to Palo Alto, started a company focused on serving college students online, bootstrapped it, eventually combined with another company, got a bunch of VC backing, went public in the dot-com boom. And we were buying lots of businesses that were real businesses, cashflow positive, that were serving students or serving colleges. And that's really where the light bulb went off for me, that there was a lot of businesses where the VC model wasn't the perfect fit and they were too small for traditional private equity, but they had a lot of growth ahead of them and a lot of the risk in the business was de-risked a bit because they had established product and they were cashflow positive. So I went to business school focused on how do I buy and invest in businesses like this and build a portfolio? did an independent study project my second year. I found one business to buy, which I did coming out of school with a friend of mine. And we grew that business nicely. I ran it for seven years. It reinforced the thesis that these small businesses were a really good financial opportunity, but I also really liked the impact that you could see on the customers and the employees as they had growth opportunities. So that's when we started Greybull back in 2010, and we've been doing this strategy for 15 years.
Shiv: Yeah, and that's what I really love about your approach. And I'm one of the audience to kind of hear about that and giving your Omaha background, I can see some of the Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger philosophies in your approach as well. So talk about this pre-middle market idea, because we meet a ton of private equity firms that are investing in these middle market companies. They need to hit certain metrics. They need to have certain growth rates or have net revenue retention at a certain place. At some point, like to me, a lot of the middle market firms end up sounding the same because they're all chasing after very similar assets. And at the same time, I sometimes see that there's a lack of creativity, which you need creativity to really drive alpha, right? Because if everybody's chasing the same assets, then you're to be paying a premium price point for that asset. And now driving alpha is a lot harder versus the other options in the market. Whereas I see this longer tail of smaller companies that may not be ready for private equity that there is a ton of opportunity in, but private equity doesn't touch those assets because they don't hit some of those characteristics. And so I see that really more of a focus for you and walk us through how you see the value creation thesis there.
Mason: Yeah, well, I think you said this, but I'll just say it in a different way. There's opportunity there, right? Because there's a lot of good companies that are maybe they don't have everything perfect that a mid-market private equity would firm would look for. Maybe they're too small, but there's a lot of businesses and there's just not that much capital focused on serving them and supporting them. So that's the fundamental opportunity there to play in that space and really maximize the opportunity. To oversimplify it, you need to be really good at a couple of things. One is selection, right? It's a little bit, it's a much more inefficient, confusing, chaotic marketplace because there's so many companies, the information isn't that good. So you need to be really skilled and experienced at sifting through all of these opportunities and selecting the ones that are the gems in that crowd that you really can scale. And the other thing you need to be really good at, which is, you know, makes, when I listened to your show, I loved it, is you have to be really good at fundamental operating improvements at the businesses to help make them stronger and prepare them to be mid-market companies. And so those are two things that we've focused tons of time and energy on as being really good at those two things. And in particular, the second one. The other thing that I would say as we get into that is it rarely goes perfectly, right? So you need to be creative, as you mentioned before. You need to be somewhat flexible and not run the same playbook every single time and be able to handle the twists and turns that happen with these smaller businesses.
Shiv: One thing, and I'm glad you said that, I guess one thing I've noticed is private equity firms and GPs are often constrained by the fund size and the thesis or characteristics that they've laid out. Many times I'll hear an investor go, well, we're only focused on SaaS companies that are north of 10 million in ARR or FinTech companies that have these kinds of characteristics. And that becomes like a filtering mechanism, which I think is a good thing in some ways, because you know what you're kind of saying no to, but at the same time, they kind of get handcuffed by their own criteria and they can't capture some of these other opportunities that might be a little bit out of their strike zone, if you will. so walk me through like how you've done that at Greybull or how have you been able to kind of go after different types of businesses that may not be all cut from the same cloth or share a lot of those characteristics.
Mason: Yeah. Well, the first thing to say is there's four sectors that we focus on, which software businesses, franchisors, subscription and membership businesses. We found a few really good ones in EdTech and then specialty manufacturing. Now, so comment on that. Like we like having enough focus areas where if pricing and franchisors is crazy like it is right now. You don't need to just keep doing it, even when the pricing doesn't make any sense. You have plenty of options, but it's not so money because you need to, you want to have expertise and you want to be able to help companies in those spaces. The way we got to that is first thinking, man, we have a huge universe of companies. We need to have some way of focusing and we focused on the ideal financial characteristics. So recurring revenue, high gross margins, high bottom line margins, very capital efficient businesses. And then we also focus on business model competitive advantage and a lot of things that may be intangible, sometimes difficult to describe, but we're really focusing on things that have a moat or they're in a niche or they're very defensible, very sustainable. And that's what led us to those four sectors where we can find those financial characteristics and we've been able to find the competitive advantages that we're looking for.
Shiv: Isn't there a challenge there where you kind of get into this where, let's say you're looking at a business services company versus a manufacturing business. They're very different companies. And especially if you're planning, and we can talk about your operating model or ownership model here as well, but each business of different types has its own nuances, different playbooks apply, different areas of optimization become important. So how are you standardizing that or at least finding scale there as a smaller firm? And then talk about your operating model in terms of how you're getting involved with companies as you invest.
Mason: Yeah. Well, what we've learned is that there's a lot of commonality, even from manufacturing to the software business, when they're at this stage, right? There's a lot of fundamental or foundational projects that we can do to make the businesses stronger. And even in that context, like manufacturing companies that we focus on, they have highly repeating revenue, right? They have the same customers buying the same products every month. So there's a lot of similar dynamics. Maybe they have a little more capex than software, but sometimes maybe not as big of a difference as you might think. But the commonality is what are these size and type of businesses need to do to be a stronger business, have a stronger foundation, and then enable them to scale? And so what we've done, we actually have more operating people on our team than we do have investment people. And we really focus on the first two or three years of the investment. And then I'll start at the end and then go back to the beginning. We have in our dashboard, 36 fundamental things that we work on, 24 are foundational and then 12 or more growth upside focused. And we just have a systematic way of prioritizing which of those projects we undertake in which order. And it is not a 100 day plan. That is not something that we would recommend for smaller businesses like this. It takes a few years to get through the foundational projects that we want to get through. And the projects may be similar and there is a lot of commonality among our businesses on the projects. The sequence is probably different. The emphasis is a little different among them. And we have full-time, we call them operating partners and as you've explored in depth on your podcast. There's a lot of different ways to do operating teams, but our operating partners are full time on our team. They participate in the carried interests and they're functional experts. so we, we, that's the way we've chosen to do it. And I think for our market and our focus and our type of company, it's worked out. It's worked out really well.
Shiv: Yeah, that's great. Can you expand on that point about the 100 day plan not being as applicable to smaller businesses and what are some of those foundational projects that you're looking at? Because I agree, like when you're a smaller company, there are some foundational elements that need to be put into place and a hundred day plan almost makes it sound too simplistic. And there's a lot of adjustment that you kind of have to make along the way, but just help us walk through some of those core areas.
Mason: Yeah. Well, the first reason that I think it takes a little bit longer with smaller businesses is they just don't have the management, the number of people on the management team to execute all the projects. Right. And even though we're going to help them with the projects, you still need people at the company to be obviously deeply involved. And so we like doing them better. and then doing them in sequence, you know, some in parallel, but mostly in sequence. And so what are some of these foundational things? I mean, I'll pick some basic ones. In the accounting and reporting function, a lot of them have not moved to GAAP accounting or have audited financials or have a smooth 10 to 15 day close process. And so a lot of it is just helping them get up to that standard. And then also on KPIs, right? We're in a, find that people have usually too many KPIs, right? They've been very entrepreneurial in what they've done so far. So they're often pursuing a lot of different growth initiatives, a lot of different KPIs. And related to that is a topic that we spend a fair amount of time and energy on in the very beginning on a strategy development process with them. In fact, we start this even in the diligence where we do basic things to find the industry. Let's understand the strengths and weaknesses of the industry, define your customer, customer needs, rank order customer needs, all those things to come up with a strategy statement, which is different than a mission statement or vision. It's more objective, are the objectives. Here's how we're going to do it. Here's the scope. Here's our how. Here's our differentiation. And it's a much more tangible way for us to get on the same page with the company get aligned, which then will drive the KPIs that I was starting to mention, but then also drive the sequence of projects that we do at the companies. To give you another couple of examples, marketing and sales. A lot of these companies, and I've heard this theme on your podcast, but it's true for us. They are bootstrapped, right? So they haven't focused a lot of energy on marketing and sales. And so we may not do it as well or as sophisticated as you would do it, Shiv, but we get them to the few stages more advanced than where they are right now. And sometimes they may not have a sales team at all, right? So you got to stand up a sales team and decide how you're going to do that, how you're going to compensate them and all those fundamental foundational things to put them in a position to scale.
Shiv: Yeah, I really like the point that you mentioned on the strategy side. One thing I find even with larger companies and definitely for smaller companies is that people don't take the time to think about the strategic trade-offs they need to make to succeed and really nail down what the focus areas should be to get them to where they want to go. There's not usually a North Star metric and then all the activities don't kind of cascade into that. And so there's like this distracted focus and resources are kind of allocated all over the place. So I'm wondering like, do you see that as well? And like we're big fans of Michael Porter and Patrick Lindsay and those kinds of things So, I'm wondering are you bringing a lot of those types of conversations into these companies?
Mason: For sure. I mean, just to say it in a different way, what has often gotten these companies to this stage is not what's gonna get them to the next stage. It's the first stage, it's entrepreneurial, make sure you've got a product or service that's a fit in the marketplace, all those things. And oftentimes the entrepreneur is a very good entrepreneur. They're pursuing opportunities. They're always willing to shift on a dime to pursue a better opportunity. And that's a great skill. And that's what got them to a certain point. To get to the next level, they need to focus on the trade-offs that you're talking about. And that means saying no to things. That means focusing on certain things. And we help them sort through and process. They have a lot of information and intuition about where the opportunities are. And by running through that strategy process, it helps bring those out and share. And so yes, we use all sorts of frameworks. We use the Michael Porter Five Forces framework and plenty of others that then lead to an OGSM framework.
Shiv: Right. And as you're kind of doing this, I guess you mentioned this idea like we might need to stand up a sales team or build some of these foundational pillars. As a firm, you're prepared then in that case, like to invest more where like, let's say a company is doing 20% EBITDA to see that margin decline in the short run for a longer term gain, I would assume. How does your modeling look like there?
Mason: Yes, in fact, you know, that's often what happens, right? I know that happens for plenty of other strategies too, but for us, first of all, you're starting with not as big of a need to die as you would have in mid-market companies. So you don't have as much room, but absolutely you need to make investments. And sometimes they're very basic. Like, hey, we need a 401k plan. We need a better healthcare plan, you know, or we need a CFO, right? And they didn't have the expense of a CFO in there before. So yes, we are willing to do that. And the first two or three years, we're not focused on the financial performance. I mean, we obviously keep an eye on it. We want it to be good, but it's not the signal of value creation. The value creation is sort of more fundamental, harder to see, but then years three plus, you know, we really want to see the growth in the scaling, which also gets to, you know, another point that you mentioned in the beginning, is we have a longer hold period typically than most private equity. Our average is seven or eight years. And the reason is that you want time to go through that first two or three year process, and then you want time for it to scale. And if you're taking a two to three million EBITDA business and getting it to eight, nine or 10 million, it makes financial sense to let it get a little bigger, get the multiple expansion, get the fundamental value creation, then sell it too quickly where maybe it goes from three to four million and you die, you're still gonna do fine, but you're really not maximizing the payback on the time we invested and the capital we invested. It makes sense to give it time to grow.
Shiv: Yeah. And how does that work in your investment model where you're holding it for that long? Like walk us through the structure of the firm. Are you guys operating more like a family office then you have LPs that are kind of putting pressure to say we need to sell an asset to make distributions happen. Just, just walk us through that a bit.
Mason: Yeah, at our core, have an evergreen fund structure, like it's more of a holding company. And so the capital that I think it on paper is over 30 year time horizon with that fund. And it operates in four year cycles where LPs commit capital for a cycle. Then there's a moment in between cycles where new LPs can join existing LPs can redeem or the existing LPs can change their commitment for the next cycle up or down. So we have this fundamental cycle that allows for longer hold periods and allows for LPs to come in and out throughout those hold periods. And alongside that holding company, we have a traditional 10-year fund structure. But we realized that our average hold period is seven or eight years. so, you know, both structures work well. Different LPs prefer different structures. And we often find, you'll probably appreciate this, we often find that when we do our role, the company most often gets to a phase where there's probably a bigger private equity firm that can create more value from that point forward. And so there's usually a trade that works, right? The price they're willing to pay works because they can create so much value from that point forward and then it works for us. So we very much have a, you know, what's right for the company. And for a lot of our companies, it makes sense for the longer hold period so that they have more time to execute their strategy. But then it also may make sense for a different owner to own the company because they can create so much more value from that point forward.
Shiv: How much are you, and I get that on the longer hold period, that all makes sense. How much are you leveraging M&A and debt as part of the value creation planning here? Or is it more that you wanna build the foundational pieces and with that, there's a growth expectation that organically the asset grows and you're gonna generate a return there.
Mason: Yeah, on the first point with debt and leverage across our portfolio, it's very small. It's like one and a half times EBITDA leverage or something like that. Now, some of our businesses, we might lever it two or three times and then a lot will have zero leverage, but the average is quite small. And so our returns are coming from fundamental growth, right? Growth in revenue, growth in EBITDA. And then usually, because the company is stronger and it's bigger, there's multiple expansion that goes along with that. We are doing add-ons and that's a key part of the strategy, particularly recently and as we go forward. In our early years, we were capital constraints, so we weren't doing huge amounts of add-ons, but we've done that and it's had a really nice impact. And so we're leaning into that a bit more as we go forward.
Shiv: Got it. Yeah, I saw a couple of announcements and mergers on your website. So like Pogo Pass and GetOutPass. I saw that. So that makes sense. I guess, based on the model that you have, what I find interesting here is that, you know, when you buy a company that's let's say, one or 2 million and EBITDA, the multiple that you have to pay to buy that business is much lower. And if you can get that past 5 million or 7 million EBITDA mark, you're getting significantly higher multiples. So that alone, adds a ton of alpha if you're able to kind of get it there. And then with the lower debt, guess you're in lesser M&A, you're taking on less risk to generate that kind of a return. But are there situations where investments cap out or you're starting, you start to see like a law of diminishing returns and optimizing and kind of growing these companies because maybe their ceiling is to be a $10 million business or a $12 million business and now they need some inorganic growth?
Mason: Yeah, I mean, we haven't seen a lot of that. And I think one reason is on the upfront selection, we are focused on businesses that can scale. Like they may not have the largest TAM that, you know, the mid market private equity may look for, but that's the addressable market still quite large. And so we haven't necessarily seen that. And there's a lot of buyers who also know even if that were the case, there's a lot of buyers who know how to take that asset and then get the next level of growth out of it. So, but most of the time we're focused on things that can scale and have a lot of runway ahead of them. So we really haven't hit that.
Shiv: That kind of, yeah, I get that. And so what are some of those core areas? Well, let's say you buy a business that's doing three to 5 million in revenue, and let's say one to 2 million in EBITDA. What are some of the core areas that you mentioned strategy or just strategic focus as one of those pillars? What are some of other pillars that you're investing into?
Mason: Yeah. Yeah. So maybe we'll sort of go what is a common sequence of things. So there's the strategy usually upfront followed by accounting and reporting. And that's just like getting a lot of those fundamental systems in place. Technology. So technology operating partner. We do have software businesses. So in those contexts, you know, we're helping advise on how to build the dev team, how to improve their processes and those sorts of things. Pretty much every other non-software business is very tech enabled these days, certainly in what we invest in. So there's a lot of, we need to change the underlying operating system or ERP system of the business? What other systems we might need to put a CRM in place if we're standing up the sales team, things like that. So technology, we have full-time recruiter. So oftentimes we'll need to recruit a controller, recruit a VP of sales. So that's common. I know operating activity of private equity firms and we certainly do that. We also have legal and governance focused to, know, make sure these entrepreneurial companies have set up the foundation of contracts and insurance and all those things as well as they should to become a mid-market company. But those are sort of the fundamental pieces. then going back to strategy, then it's growth, you know. And usually these entrepreneurs have a long list. Here's our 20 growth ideas, which is awesome, but it becomes the trade-off conversation that you mentioned earlier about picking which ones and then what is the investment required to, maybe it's an add-on, maybe it's organic, whatever it is, what is the investment required to execute against that growth strategy?
Shiv: And how do you prioritize that with them? Because sometimes a growth strategy can be investing more in marketing. Sometimes it could be sales. Sometimes it's a new product feature. So how are those conversations going and how do you help them prioritize that?
Mason: Yeah, to put it maybe in an overly simplistic way, we're looking for high probability of success activities, right? We're looking for things that are very, very likely to work, first of all. And then second of all, we're ranking them on financial payback and competitive advantage payback. So if something is very probable, very nice payback financially and competitive advantage that will float to the top of the list. If something is a home run possibility, but it's a 60% chance you're gonna strike out, we're not gonna do that, right? We're gonna stack high probability growth initiatives on high probability growth initiatives. And that's the way that you then make the company bigger, then you have more to invest in future growth initiatives, and it sort of becomes a compounding machine, which is what we're trying to do.
Shiv: Yeah, I think that's a great point. think a lot of companies, it's like a shiny object syndrome where they're getting distracted by the next big idea or they're betting on things that have a lower likelihood of success. And then when it doesn't work out, you have resources that have been deployed that you can't really get back. And now you've lost some of the momentum that the core business has. And so doing things in the right order is kind of really important because each new thing that actually does generate a return. Now you have more resources to kind of invest into the next thing.
Mason: Exactly. And there's a psychological impact too that we see, which is a built confidence. You know, if they're going from an entrepreneurial and, hey, let's be much more strategic about what we pick. You pick the right thing. It works. Like the culture and the DNA of the company starts to gain confidence that that's the way for the future. And then you just start stacking those initiatives and people are confident that, Hey, we can do this and it's going to happen and it's going to create value.
Shiv: I love that point. I think that is very understated. Like even our business were about six years old and I've wanted to build a software for many years and this year we finally are doing it. But it took a lot of reps and things going well and the PE relationships growing, the podcast doing well, the book going well. You know, like we've slowly stacked these things where now we feel confident enough to be able to invest in our own software where four years ago when I thought of it, it we just weren't ready for it as an organization psychologically, right? So I think getting everybody, especially when you're younger as a business to get to that point is a huge win.
Mason: Thanks. Absolutely. Yeah.
Shiv: I want to talk about some of the other things you mentioned because some of it is like the foundational stuff that you need for companies. But I find that smaller businesses just don't have that. And we've had past guests that are advisors or lawyers or bankers on and they say that deals often fall apart because companies don't have some of those foundational elements. Like you mentioned, accounting and reporting, like a lot of small businesses aren't even GAAP compliant or they're just doing cash based accounting and they don't have the right IP assignments for software and basic things like that. So how much of the work is that so that one day when you are preparing to exit, a lot of those fundamental things are in place.
Mason: I guess there's a couple of ways to rank it as like how much work and then the importance of the work. I would say the importance of the work is very high, right? Because sophisticated buyers upstream in market private equity firms, they don't want to mess with that stuff. They want it to be in place. So it's sort of a binary thing. Like you need to do it. Now, I think we, one of the benefits of doing this over and over and over again with this size of company is that we're efficient at doing it, right? So just making sure that we get through that foundational. I think, and so that might create some, maybe it's a turn, right? If you're buying a company for five times, maybe you get six times if that's all you did, right? But the bigger opportunity is to focus on the growth and the fundamental growth and the fundamental value creation and building and deepening competitive advantages. That's where you can really scale the company and really have created an asset that's very attractive to a lot of people. So that's how I would say it. I mean, you sort of have to do the foundational things. It's really important, but it's one advantage of ours is that when you do it over and over again with these smaller businesses, you can do a better job.
Shiv: Yeah, totally. Yeah. And one thing I wanted to ask, and you hit on some of that here is just, you know, you mentioned installing systems or tech stack changes and maybe a CRM and a lot of these things are like infrastructure projects, which are important for the business and continuity purposes and some of those things. But at the same time, infrastructure projects don't move the needle on growth and revenue all the time, right? You can have the best CRM and best implementation at the same time you actually need to do the sales work that is done on top of the CRM, right? So how do you balance those two priorities between each other because the value creation work still needs to happen.
Mason: Well, and I think this is where the time element comes into, right? So we've done our best to set expectations with the companies and with our investors. There is going to be this time period of two or three years in the beginning where we're doing things like that. And the value creation isn't very obvious in a financial way. But we've also learned from experience that if you try and do the growth on an imperfect foundation, all you're going to be doing is just doing double the work down the road. So it's much better for everybody to do the work well in the beginning so that you can scale on top of it with confidence that the systems are gonna hold up and they're repeatable and sustainable and all those things.
Shiv: Yeah, I guess that approach requires your firm to have this higher degree of patience as an investor to be able to see some of this through. It's almost like a cultural value, patient investing takes longer time. Let's do all the fundamental things because we know eventually it will lead to higher growth or higher value. So how do you cultivate that inside the firm? Because you kind of have to get all your investors and operating partners all on the same page with that philosophy.
Mason: Yeah, and I think, you know, because my background was, you know, an owner operator of these size of businesses and the people on our operating team, you know, were at companies that were maybe this size, but then scaled into middle mid market companies. And so I think there's a sort of a company first operations first sort of thinking that do its best for the company. And we've all seen it before. We've all seen it work. So there's a confidence that we can convey to the company and to the investors. And the investors see it in the numbers, right? So I think for them, it's a little bit easier because they see the results. But with a company, they're really, they're maybe sometimes more anxious than we are to get onto the growth phase. And I think because we've lived it before, we've had success with it before, we can tell those examples, show those examples to the companies and give them confidence that this is the right way to do it. And also they can talk to our fellow port, their fellow portfolio companies, right? Maybe in the back of their mind, they're like, Hey, these repeat guys, like they're going to get super anxious here if something hasn't happened in two years. So there might be some validation that they can find that no, these guys are in, there's always twists and turns. So that's the other thing that I would say is that probably is true in much bigger businesses too, but it never goes perfectly. There's always little things that you mess up or they're not quite right. They're not what you expected it to be. And having, we've worked through those many, many times. And so we're confident and we have the culture, cultural patience and understanding to work through that.
Shiv: All right. Yeah, I think getting the portfolio companies to buy in is also another task, right? Because you can have a CEO that's like ready to invest in the next thing and there's foundational work that still kind of has to be done.
Mason: Yes. Yeah, for sure. That is the more common stance, right? And of course, I would probably be the same way if I was the CEO of that company, right? Like, I'd want to be getting on with the growth as soon as possible. And there's just the right balance and the right way to do that.
Shiv: Yeah. Right, right. That's great. Yeah, there's one thing that's a bit of a running joke inside of our company that I often say is like the longest route is often the fastest route. And it's something that I think aligns with what you're saying here is it sometimes feels like you're going about doing all these things that don't necessarily connect to the outcome, but it's often the only way to get somewhere. Like you can't really short circuit some of the stages because you have to go through every step, right? So I definitely identify with that. We're coming up on time. So before we close off, like if people want to learn more about you or Greybull, where should they go to connect?
Mason: Yeah, mean, best for me is email just mason at Greybull Stewardship dot com. The website also works. LinkedIn, Mason Myers, pretty straightforward all those ways and we'd love to connect.
Shiv: Awesome. Yeah. And with that said Mason, thanks for coming on and sharing your wisdom. I personally really enjoyed this conversation. I think it's a huge opportunity and there's this huge long tail of businesses that probably fit this criteria that I think could benefit from your investment philosophy. So thanks for being on and sharing that.
Mason: Yes. Well, thank you. It's great to be here. Super enjoyed it. Super enjoy your show.
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Ep 68: Joseph Hanna of Pivoting Model Partners
Product, Pivoting, and AI as Agents
Learn differentiating your product's feature set and the customer's perceived value in that set and why companies should consider pivoting as a way to grow and sustain their business.

Episode 69: Devon Kirk and Jonathan Metrick of Portage
How Investment and Ops Teams Can Work Together
Learn about their experiences investing in global FinTech and financial services, when in the deal cycle to bring in the ops team, and how they interface with each other during diligence and beyond.
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