Justin Ishbia - Lessons from Acquiring 586 Companies [Invest Like the Best, REPLAY]
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The best operators have a relentless focus on leverage, finding ways to multiply their impact rather than just working harder. But here's what I see happening in finance teams everywhere. Brilliant people getting buried in expense management busy work. If you think about it, you become a finance leader because you love strategic work. Modeling scenarios, optimizing capital allocation, finding the insights that actually move the business forward. But instead, you're chasing receipts and categorizing transactions. It's the opposite of leverage. This is exactly why I'm so bullish on what the team
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of PositiveSum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is Justin Ishbia. Justin is the founder of Shore Capital. Shore is a private equity firm that invests in micro cap businesses within industry niches. With $7,000,000,000 in capital deployed, but an average transaction size of just 12,000,000, Justin has worked to build a system to drive success for hundreds of businesses through replicable operating procedures and championing young professionals. The firm has created a moat around volume with nearly 600 acquisitions over the last three years, some of the highest numbers in the world. We discuss identifying growth prospects, cons
I followed your show for a number of years, and it's been so impressive what you've built. So you guys have a best in class audience and shown I'm honored to part to create enterprise value as a system. No one person creates a star. And so our view has always been like, how to create a system, a machine, a process that creates differentiated results outcomes. And I was raised in an environment that you always look for opportunities where others aren't looking. And my view of the world is the last inefficient part of the private market ecosystem is the micro cap. And this is where we spend all
Poking around of this system for the rest of our call is gonna be so fun, and there's so many different areas that you've had this very careful systematic thinking for how to do great deals and run a great business. Before we do all that, I'd love to rewind back a little bit to the origins of the business. And you, like so many of the investors that I've found to be the most interesting, started by, I think you called it your pre fund. You were doing these deals without a committed capital vehicle. You were sort of a fundless sponsor going around raising capital for great individual deals. It
So it wasn't just me. My partner, Ryan Kelly, my partner, Mike Cooper, and John Hennig. The four of us from day one, we were young. I was 31. They were 29, 28, and 27. So we were kids. We were essentially associate levels. Where it came from is no. Originally, Ryan and I Ryan was at Water Street, and I was at Valor Equity Partners. And what we would do all the time is we would see a deal, it's like three or four of EBITDA on an attractive sector, we bring it to our old boss and basically say, here's a roll up in this opportunity in the sector. And effectively heard no in different ways of sayi
So obviously, you were hanging your hat on this ability to stay in the small average deal size. So $7,000,000,000 but a $12,000,000 average deal size is quite something. Just not a lot
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