I Made $50M Buying & Running Boring Businesses

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
So, that was the first Golden Goose, and then you said you started stacking geese like a rapper, you know, at the club.

**Brent Beshore** (0:05)
So, what's the second goose? I hope that becomes a term that we can use, stacking geese.

**Shaan Puri** (0:08)
Yeah, stacking geese. We gotta get some shirts made.

**Brent Beshore** (0:11)
Hey, merch guy.

**Shaan Puri** (0:11)
Hey, merch guy.
So, Brent runs Permanent Equity. You started off as a founder, you started buying companies, and you then started raising money to buy companies. So, you raised something like 50 million bucks for your first fund. You started buying companies with that. Then a couple of years later, you raised about $250 million to buy more companies. And now you own, I don't know, something like 16 companies that do over $350 million a year of revenue. And I believe what you said was $50 million of free cash flow out of the portfolio now, which is pretty incredible. So, that's who you are. That's what you're bringing to the table. And I think, Sam, what do we want to go with this? Because we could ask you about buying businesses. I have some questions around that, but I kind of want to start with something light before we go into like, hey, can you teach me how to be private equity, please?

**Sam Parr** (1:09)
Yeah, we could do the light stuff. I bet you also you've got the we call it the all shucks Warren Buffett attitude, where you've got a list of one liners. You write amazing annual reports. You're a great writer. So we have a bunch of one liners that we want to ask you about as well. Sounds good. Can you tell me what do you buy in one of the biggest companies? You buy like pool companies and HVAC companies?

**Brent Beshore** (1:29)
Yeah, I mean, we typically, we've got everything from a children's clothing brand to a military recruitment firm to manufacturing, construction, business services. I mean, it's really the 16 companies, it looks like the island of misfit toys. For us, they're companies that we love the people who we get to work with. They're in industries that we feel like are not going to be changing. We can talk about how some of them maybe look like high change, especially like the children's clothing, would seem high change on the surface but is actually not. We tried to partner with them for a long time.

**Sam Parr** (2:00)
What's the biggest one in terms of revenue and profit?

**Brent Beshore** (2:02)
Let's see. In terms of revenue and profits, probably our fencing business out of Dallas, Texas is probably the largest. So we have a big market share in the Dallas market, and it's a pretty sizable business.

**Sam Parr** (2:19)
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**Shaan Puri** (2:50)
I was gonna ask you a similar question.
People are always like, you can't pick a favorite kid. And as an investor, you can. You have this portfolio, and some are better than others, and that's okay. It would be weird if all of your companies were equally successful investments. I wouldn't believe you. And so, what's the golden goose for you? So, which one is like, I know in my portfolio, I have a mini version of what you do, where we have like four or five companies that we have either bought or own a big stake in. And I could tell you, I'd be like, oh, for us, the somewhere.com business was like my golden goose. Partly because I got in on a great price, but also the business tripled since we bought it, and it's just this business that just spits out cash flow, and it's like the market keeps growing for this, people need this. And so for us, that's been the golden goose. It just keeps laying a golden egg every single month for us. What's the golden goose in your portfolio?

**Brent Beshore** (3:43)
Oh, we've been fortunate to actually like, we've kind of stacked golden geese on one another, is how I would describe it. So the very first business I bought, it's called MediaCross, it's a military recruitment firm, bought that in very early 2010