Justin Mazeka Vogt Profile picture
CEO @ Evermore Industries where we invest in and help operate amazing small businesses // Notre Dame // Bain Capital // Stanford GSB
Inkwood PT Profile picture 1 subscribed
Nov 23, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
To all of the searchers, the next 8 weeks are vital for direct sourcing

Business owners are taking vacations and spending time with family. Many will speak with their family about retirement and selling the company

Here is how we capitalized on this time of year... Between Thanksgiving and New Year:
1. Load up the pipeline with new prospects and get them at least two emails during this time. Response rates will be low. Don't worry, the real value comes in Jan
2. Start writing personalized emails to be sent in the second week of January
Nov 20, 2022 4 tweets 1 min read
A warm welcome to all of my new followers from @SMB_Attorney's thread

You can expect me to tweet a lot about sourcing, acquiring, and investing in small businesses with a particular focus on search funds

A quick bio... My business partner and I started Evermore Industries in late 2020 as a permanent capital investor in and operator of small businesses

Acquired AVUITY in early 2022, which is where we dedicate the majority of our time today
Nov 11, 2022 11 tweets 3 min read
A thread of the threads I send to those considering or just starting a search fund...
Oct 8, 2022 7 tweets 1 min read
As Entrepreneurship through Acquisition gains popularity, it will undoubtedly change over the coming years

Here is a list of my predictions for how the traditional EtA landscape will change over the coming 5 years... Searchers will find the EtA model that best suits their goals rather than fitting their goals to the model
Traditional, self-funded, accelerator, holding company, Majority Search, etc.

More models will continue to emerge that are tailored to the searcher's specific goals
Aug 20, 2022 7 tweets 2 min read
Answers to the most common questions I got in DMs and emails about this thread

Time to get tactical Where did you find your VA?

This thread is the best resource I have found for hiring a full-time VA

Aug 15, 2022 13 tweets 2 min read
How did we do proprietary outreach during our search process?

A combination of List Building Sites, Airtable, Virtual Assistants, Upwork, Reply. io and Pipedrive

A step-by-step guide 🧵🧵🧵 This assumes you have a target industry

After picking an industry of interest we would find the associated NAICS code here: naics.com/search/
Jul 16, 2022 12 tweets 3 min read
Stanford's latest Search Fund Study came out yesterday

Highly recommend giving the whole thing a read, or just scroll through my takeaways here... The Study covers 526 traditional search funds that have been formed since 1984

In 2020 and 2021 there were 124 traditional searches launched, 66 acquisitions, and $776M of equity invested
Apr 26, 2022 6 tweets 2 min read
So you are considering doing a search fund. Great!

Having a "bias to action" while deciding if this is the right path for you will help enormously

Here are 4 ideas

🧵🧵🧵 1) SMB Job Shadow
MBA students: do an internship with a search acquired biz
Not in B School: offer to do some free work in exchange for time shadowing

The SMB community is very supportive of those that show initiative

Time Commitment: A few weeks

getrevue.co/profile/BigDea…
Apr 21, 2022 8 tweets 2 min read
So you are considering doing a search fund. Great!

Before you send your first "pick your brain" email read these: Stanford Search Fund Study

gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-resear…
Sep 9, 2021 10 tweets 2 min read
We have done a lot of direct owner outreach in pursuit of acquiring an SMB

A thread on the lessons we have learned

🧵🧵🧵 First some stats

Jun 3, 2021 8 tweets 2 min read
We love maintenance and repair businesses

We hope to acquire & operate one or more in the coming year

Our investment thesis in Twitter thread form.... 1. Recurring revenue

Preventative maintenance contracts are a beautiful thing as they provide stability. Our target is 70-80% of revenue to be from maintenance contracts. Supplementing this base with equipment sales and emergency repair is great for the customer and margins
May 18, 2021 12 tweets 2 min read
Building a list of acquisition targets is no easy task

Here is how we do it for relatively little money over the course of about a week... Start with an excel sheet that has these columns: Company Name, Company Name Cleaned, Website, Employees, City, State, First Name, Last Name, Email, LinkedIn
Apr 28, 2021 15 tweets 4 min read
A thread with answers to the questions we get most often from prospective acquisition entrepreneurs.

This won’t cover every detail, but it will hopefully cover first level Q&A.

This is meant to supplement what is on our website: evermore.industries Why did you start Evermore?

Evermore is the manifestation of what Ed and I hope to achieve in our professional lives. Our goal is to work with, in and on small businesses to help them be contributors to their local communities.

For more context: alexbridgeman.com/podcasts/justi…
Apr 9, 2021 10 tweets 2 min read
The stages of raising a search fund:

A thread 🧵🧵

1) Hear about the model through friends / colleagues / business school / twitter. Search funds are gaining popularity these days and considering you follow me, you have probably already achieved this step (well done!) 2) Start reading about search funds. I highly recommend starting here in order to cover the fundamentals:

endurancesearchpartners.com/understanding-…
Apr 8, 2021 7 tweets 2 min read
An industry thesis driven search is all the rage today, but getting up to speed on an new industry/niche quickly is a skill.

Here is how we do it in ~27 hours Step 1: Desktop research focused on validating that the industry is growing and has decent margins. No need to go any deeper

Resources: Ibisworld, snippets of paid research, Public Co disclosures, Fed data
Time: 5 hours
Mar 19, 2021 7 tweets 2 min read
Getting to know investors ahead of pitching is incredibly powerful

Tips on how to do it without a warm intro. A thread 🧵

Please add with other ideas! Put yourself out there

Tell people what you are interested in or working on. There are so many wonderfully helpful people out there, but they can’t help if they don’t know what you want to do

Twitter, industry conferences, blogs & forums are a great place to start
Mar 1, 2021 12 tweets 3 min read
Holding companies and long-term holds have gained a lot of popularity in the SMB world. The best literature on the topic is from AJ Wasserstein.

My notes from his most recent paper: On the Nature of Long-term Holds: How Entrepreneurs Can Operationalize this Approach

A thread Here is a link to the paper: yale.app.box.com/s/i8o06d1lv37e…

Note, the paper includes collaboration from SMB Twitter’s favorite @tsludwig
Nov 28, 2020 11 tweets 3 min read
Adding a thread to touch on each "alternative" here. Happy to answer questions on any given model or send links to relevant material. Traditional Search Model. Generally pursued by recent MBA graduates, but open to anyone. Searchers raise a pool of capital ($400-$600k) to fund a ~2 year search and then investors have a ROFR on the acquisition found by the searcher. gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-resear…