An overnight success,
a few years
in the making.

We started out as operators, not investors. We never intended to become buyers.

We spent years building and running businesses in the trades and service industries. Along the way, we learned what actually makes these companies tick - the routes, the technicians, the recurring customers, the local trust that takes a decade to build.

Every once in a while, we'd get an email from a private equity firm. Their emails were confusing. They bragged about their ‘AUM’ and ‘CAGR’ and dropped that they'd gone to Harvard every third sentence. They were aliens. We didn't speak their language. Spreadsheet jockeys who'd never met a payroll.

Eventually, we gave in and sold one of our businesses to them. It was a brutal six-month marathon. Piles of legal documents, constant renegotiations, and all-day meetings that spooked our management team.

By closing, we were exhausted and barely recognized the deal we'd originally shaken hands on.

Then we read about how Warren Buffett does billion-dollar deals quickly by keeping the process painless and promising founders to take good care of their businesses. Nobody had done this for great companies like ours, so we said "screw it" and decided to do it ourselves, using Buffett's simple approach.

We started Holter Holdings to be different. To become the buyer we wish we could have sold to.

We thought about all the things we hated about selling our company and worked backwards, then used our capital to buy wonderful businesses from founders like us.

It turns out that selling your company doesn't need to be so complicated and miserable. We make offers in days, not months, let founders dictate their role (stay, go, or something in between), and leave the companies we acquire alone for the long term.

So far, it's worked out well. Our portfolio is growing and we're still going.

Life is too short to sell to a guy named Chad who calls your team "human capital."