Write to me
This address comes straight to me. A note that says not now is fine, and if you’d rather meet, I’ll fly out.
I haven’t bought one yet, so this would be my first.
What matters most to me is the people in a company and the culture they’ve built. I want to treat the company I buy as part of my family, with the people who work there looked after and the customers who rely on them looked after too.
I’d be buying a company because it already works, and I’d need the people who make it work. I can’t promise that nothing would ever change, but this is what I intend.
I spent my career building software for the aviation industry, and I fly. That’s how I got interested in this. You start asking who actually makes the parts that have to work, and the answers are usually small companies nobody has heard of, run by someone who has been doing it for thirty years.
The name comes from a road in Wisconsin where my family spends summers.
There’s no fund behind this.
I won’t buy a company to sell it later, and I won’t take it apart to pay for it.
If we talk and nothing comes of it, it stays between us.
You might be thinking about retiring, or nobody in the family wants to take the company on. Or it might be years from now, or never. I have no deadline.
I look for companies whose name ends up on a customer’s drawing or spec and stays there for twenty years. They’re usually small and owned by one person or a family. It might be a manufacturer, a materials company, a testing or inspection shop, or an industrial service business, and it can be anywhere in the country.
This address comes straight to me. A note that says not now is fine, and if you’d rather meet, I’ll fly out.