YouSaid · the spoken record

Graham Weaver

lines on the record: 142
first: 2025-05-27
most recent: 2025-05-27
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yeah, good news. Your thing is in there somewhere. And then we try to take those nine and talk about which ones they have the most energy for, who are they going to meet along the way, how are they going to grow? I mean, a great example is a student of mine.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, what's cool about the Nine Lives exercise is, I think people get really intimidated by saying you got to find your passion. And I got one thing and they get in their head. And I'm like, okay, let's say you had nine. They can rattle them off like right away. Okay, I'll do this. I'd be a professor and I'd be author and I'd start this business. I'd do a nonprofit. They could come up with them like right away. And then I'm like, good news. Let's do that.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I need to add something else to this class. I want to help students figure out what their dream really is and spend a bunch of time on that. And so we talked about this a little bit earlier. But a big part of the class is really giving the students some space and asking questions and having them do exercises, visualizations, and some other exercises to truly figure out what the thing is that they're excited about. Like if they could do anything over the next 10 years, what would that be? And that takes some time. We spend a bunch of time on that. They have to keep a journal and we have a bunch of classes and visualizations. And then when they get kind of clear on that, immediately they're going to have all these doubts and fears and limiting beliefs. Their head's going to talk them out of it. And so we go right at that, hey, what are the obstacles? How do we overcome that? How do we design a path to go do that? So that's probably 25% of the class now. And I think that's probably the students remember the most. Yeah.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Getting demoted or whatever it is. And we're going to role play that actual conversation. So it's really like granular people stuff. It is the important stuff as a CEO. So it's a great class. So I did that for four years. And then what I realized is students love the class, but they weren't doing it. They were like, oh, that was a great class. Thanks for that. And then their dream was to go run something and they didn't go run something. So I said.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the first four years, I just wanted to learn how to be a professor and teach. I had so many limiting beliefs, like thinking I'm not a professor, I've never taught. And so I just was probably the first four years I was just trying to be like a B plus in that. And the curriculum is largely around how to be a CEO, things like hiring, firing, having difficult conversations. It's not big strategic things. It's kind of like at the one foot level. Like you're going to have a conversation with an employee about.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the students told me, like, in the wrap up of my case, one of the takeaways was as you can see from Graham, you don't really need to have charisma or be articulate to be a CEO. I always wanted to takeaways. I was so nervous and stumbling over my words and stuff. But anyway, so yeah, I mean, the class was amazing. And then I was a case guest in his class for 12 years. And then he was going to go start a new class. And he called me one day and was like, hey, Graham, do you want to teach my class? I was almost immediately going to say no because I'm like, yeah, I already have a full-time job, but I thankfully said I'll think about it. I thought about it for a week. And I was like, I light up every time I'm in that classroom and I don't think I'll ever have this chance again. And I ended up teaching.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'm this like 28 year old that just gets my teeth kicked in again and again. So he probably wouldn't say that. But now that I teach there, I think that's the role I played in the curriculum. One funny story too. When I first started teaching his case, I was young. I was 29. I knew a lot of people in the class because I'm basically the same age.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen all these students, I've done all this. Let me just tell you, it's going to be okay. It's like your older version of yourself could come back and give you advice. He's that person. And I can't tell you how many times in my career where I've been down and out and gone and met with him and just, he just gives me a shot in the arm that I needed at the right time. And from someone that you believe it when he says it. So he's just incredible. So my experience was I was a case guest in his class And the case was about buying companies in my dorm room and all this stuff that went wrong. And I don't think Irv would say this, but I think I was like the token failure case in the quarter where it was like, you know, all these people just prey to champions.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Anyone else that that's true of? And you sit down with Irv and you are the most important person in the world for that period of time. He remembers everything from your last conversation. He later told me he takes notes afterwards and then reviews them before he meets you again. He just cares, right? So he remembers everything from your last conversation. He's always the voice of you've got this. Yeah, you got this.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say River is one of the most influential people in my life. And I would also say there's probably literally without hyperbole, probably a thousand people that would say that same thing.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly It to do one deal. And, you know, the other thing is they can just do something on a way bigger scale, they're going to run something much bigger in this, and they're going to hopefully get there a lot faster. Yeah.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The answer is it's word of mouth. One of the students goes and has a great experience running a business. Their friend hears about Alpine, calls them, and says, hey, is this real? And the friend says, I am having the absolute time of my life. Like I didn't even know this exists. I can't believe this even exists. And it is as or better than advertised. And that word of mouth. So the best thing we can do is just deliver on the experience, starting with giving them a winnable game and a lot of support. I think last year this would be surprising probably to you, but Alpine was the number one most applied to job. At Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, Kellogg Business School, the Alpine CEO and Training Program. Yeah. Yeah.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I think the great thing about getting knocked down and getting up is at some point, you just have the belief that you're going to get up and you have the expectation you're going to get knocked down every now and then. And that one is actually more rare than you would think at some of the schools that we're recruiting from. That grit isn't as common. And we've made that mistake many times. Third is I'm going to mash a whole bunch of stuff together, but it's like emotional intelligence, self-awareness, ability to get along with people. We've also got that when we've had big failures, we missed that one. So those are probably the three big ones. Surprising one would be probably just a bias for action. So getting in the arena, trying stuff. It fails. Try again versus this analysis paralysis.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you just see that show up in their life historically. They've done that. There's this ownership and drive. And that's number one. Number two, which is probably 1A, is grit. So they've been knocked down. They got up. They've been knocked down. They got up because that's going to happen as a CEO.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so I'll say something, then I'm not sure how many of these are surprising. So the number one attribute is will to win. I'm going to take this project or business or whatever, and I'm going to put it on my shoulders and run it through this burning building.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then it kind of took off from there. And when I say took off, then the next year we had two. And then next year we had three. And it took a long time. And it also took us a while to really figure out. What kind of business they would be successful in and where their blind spots were and what they could do and not do. We made every mistake you could make, but thankfully we made that on smaller classes of CEOs. And now we have it a little bit more delta. And we're still learning. I mean, I'm not declaring victory at all”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we couldn't get that first person in place. He left. The next year we had this woman, Laura Walsh, and same thing. But although this time I said to this particular CEO, I said, listen, hire her. And if she doesn't work out in a year, I'll reimburse you her salary from the management company. So like a money back guarantee. And she knocked it out of the park. And he's like, I want three more.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a very inauspicious start, Patrick. At the time we started the CO and training process, I was a guest lecturer at Stanford Business School. And I would meet with students for coffee and stuff. And the class I was a lecturer for was an entrepreneurship class. And so the students wanted to be a CEO. And they'd say, hey, how do I go do this? And Search Fund was an option. They didn't like some of the elements I mentioned earlier. And so I didn't really have a good answer. So finally one student, I said, hey, why don't you join us? We'll teach you how to be a CEO and we'll put you in one of our companies. That sounded great. So we hired this guy and we worked at him in a CO, we're going to put him in like CFO or COO in one of our companies. We couldn't get anyone to hire him in our portfolio because they said, okay, let me get the straight gram. You've got someone who's got no experience, is a little bit entitled and super expensive. Like, how about no?”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think one of the greatest sourcing engines in private equity, we're going to find phenomenal businesses. Plus, we're going to have a whole team that's going to help you evaluate the industry and make sure we're getting those right. We want you to play a winnable game. We want to give you a platform where you're going to win based on your talents and hiring and firing and all those things, not missing on the industry. You're not going to figure that out when you're 28. We're very good at that part of the business. And then once they buy the business, we want to have, and we'll get into the training. We want to say, hey, look, we have 25 years of intellectual property of how to be a CEO, but not just how to be a CEO, how to be a 30-year-old CEO going into a really established business and getting that team on your team alongside you and going forward. That's the specific intellectual property that we have. And it's not super complicated, but we might as well start you off 25 years in year 26 rather than in your zero.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Close. And if you actually look at the data I used to invest in search, I don't know, I've invested 70 search funds or more. They usually mess up that first part. Investing is a pattern recognition business. Bankers don't want to sell to them because they're only going to ever do one deal with that banker. They have a clock ticking. So there's a lot of stuff wrong with that first part. And then the other thing that doesn't really work is they don't have really any support. They're like, yeah, you get the ball good news, but you don't know what to do with the ball. So we're trying to say, hey, we have.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, using your search fund analogy, let's say that you're the kind of person that wants the ball early. That's the search fund person. They want to be CEO early. I love that. I was 25. I wanted the ball. I appreciate that characteristic. So they want the ball early. And if you think about what they want the ball to do, it's to go run a business. That's what they want. In the search fund world, they first have to go build a private equity firm to find.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A real hold co with a phenomenal team in a large industry really spend the time to get the playbook right and give yourself some breathing room. And if we're doing that again and again and again, we're now starting to have a lot more consistent businesses that are these outliers. In our more recent funds, it's not one company. In fact, in our most recent fund, I'm biased, but I think just about every company has that potential as of now to be a real outlier.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At least one real outlier deal per fund as we're learning, we're figuring out the ingredients of that outlier better and better and better so that we're hoping that each seed that we're planting at least has the potential to be that outlier. We want every shot on gold to at least have that upside. They won't all hit that, but we're getting better at identifying the ingredients of that outlier, which is, hey, build a real.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's definitely an asymmetry for sure. One of my favorite things, I remember I used to read every word that Buffett ever wrote in his annual reports. And I'm going to get this a little bit wrong, but it'll be directionally correct. I want to say in like 1988 or something, he'd made half of all of his money on two stocks, GEICO and the Washington Post. He had tons of businesses he bought and sold and everything, but 50% of it was like asymmetry. Yeah, we tend to have.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where the 5x comes into play is you have these asymmetric outcomes where things go right, organic growth kicks in better than you thought, and you can hold the business longer than you thought. You can kind of portfolio or manage your way to a 5x through a bunch of getting on base and then good things happening. If we underwrote an individual deal to 5x, we would never close a deal. So that's kind of how we think about it.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the way we think about it is we're underwriting typically an individual deal to a, let's say, a 3x net outcome. And that will typically not have multiple expansion. It'll have you're buying the business, you're leveraging it with whatever the debt multiple the company is, and then you're growing it, we should be able to get to kind of a 3x, 3-5 gross in five years. So that's kind of our typical standard underwriting.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Replicate this study, but 70% of people dislike their job or they're disengaged from their job right now today. And if we can flip that and have 70% of people feel really engaged, it's not just that it's good for business, but I think it makes a big difference in these employees' lives. And so we take that really seriously. And it's something that it's probably one of the things I'm the proudest of of all the things that we've done.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How engaged and happy are employees. And then we measure every six months going forward, and we publish that across all of Alpine. And we hold CEOs accountable for two reasons. One is I think it is probably one of, if not the most important leading indicator of success for the business. And two, going back to being a force for good, it's probably the thing I'm the proudest of in terms of the impact that we have is 40,000 employees are having an experience that they enjoy coming to work more significantly more after we buy the business. And I just think about, okay, you're a single mom and you're working at a call center in one of our companies or something before we come in, you know, maybe you're clocking in, you're clocking out, you're not that excited. You're spending half your waking hours doing this. Maybe the people don't know your name or whatever. And then how do you show up in your community? And 70% of people, and this is true across any industries in the US, you can.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 100%. Just work backwards. I think the two biggest underappreciated leading indicators of success are the net promoter score of the customers and the net promoter score of the employees. We go and we measure the net promoter score of employees right when we buy the business. In other words, before we came in the business.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heard. So they do that with the employees. They do that with the customers. And then from that, they're kind of enrolling the top people and designing the plan. Here's what we got to do. Here's what the low-hanging fruit is. And usually the fruit is so low. And it's so obvious when you get through that. I know because I did this. I took over a business at one point. And I remember thinking, how did they not do all this stuff? They just talk to their own people. One of my executive coaches had this great quote. The answer is always in the room. You don't have to go hire McKinsey. If you go hire McKinsey, they're going to go do what I just said. They're going to go interview your people and then repeat back what you just heard. And you do that with the customers as well, and then the customers will tell you about the product or.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're really engendering trust. And then we're using that, and we might say, hey, I heard that your number one, Apatrick, I heard you're a favorite idea was that we're going to expand internationally. We're not going to do that this quarter, but we did hear you. You don't have to do everything they say, but they have to feel.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's this 28 year old that doesn't know the industry. They're not thrilled on day zero, which is understandable. The first move for the first 60 days is listen. They sit down with the key employees and say, hey, tell me about your role. What do you do here? What's going well? What else? What else? What else? What's not going well? What else? What else? Hey, if you were me, what would you be focused on? What should the top priorities be? What are we working on that's a waste of time? What should I be worried about? What are the biggest opportunities we have right now, biggest problems? They're going and doing that and they're meeting with, depending on how big the business is, they might be meeting with 20, 30 people in the business. Without a doubt, without fail, one of the first biggest things people say is I've worked here for 15 years and no one's ever asked me my opinion before. In a very short period of time, we're really.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, they have that intellectual property. They're literally partnering with this first time CEO and going through this first six months of paint by numbers what they're going to do. But I'll give you an example. CEO walks in day zero. They make their big announcement. People are upset because Joe's plumbing, Joe's retiring. They've been working with Joe for 15 years.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And, like, some of the I'll give you a couple things. So, first is we have about 30 coaches in our ecosystem that are versed in this playbook. And so they get paired up with. This first time CEO, and they've been through it a lot of times, and they're doing this specifically the Alpine playbook so they can.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or something. Yeah. And I would say at a headline at Solve It with Talent. And underneath that is a whole bunch of intellectual property about how to make that person who goes into that company on day one be really successful. Because if you just change management, it's really hard. And it can go really badly. We've learned that the hard way. We have a lot of intellectual property. I'm like, what does that CEO actually do on day zero and the first 30 days and 60 days and 90 days? We have an intellectual property on the systems and how we're measuring it and literally how they're hiring. It is what you said, Patrick. But then underneath that, there's a lot of intellectual property about how to actually do that.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then hopefully repatriate someone from our system into be the leadership team. And we have a lot of the key decisions already made and evaluated where we have plenty of time and patience before we ever have to wire money.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Military veterans as general manager of that company, they've been phenomenal. That's an example of starting literally with a blank piece of paper, which is how we do each thing. We form a pot of people to go assess a bunch of different industries. We design the playbook.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Division today, the business we initially bought was $40 million, I think, of revenue and AD of EBITDA. This year it'll do $3 billion of revenue. We haven't put any more equity in. They've just been accumulating these small little businesses. So the business has gone from, we put in 50 million of equity this year, it'll do 500 million of EBITDA and we put in no additional equity. And it's just been an exercise in just really having each business that we acquire putting incredible talent. We rip out their IT systems and we put in a financial package, an ERP system, a business intelligence system. And then every single company we buy has to literally input every job they do exactly the same so we can compare all the data across all the companies. And then we have a training school now for the military veterans. I think we have 80.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I give AJ and Will a ton of credit, but they tapped into the veteran market. They built their own CEO and training program because they came through the Alpine's program. They said, this is amazing. The company's called Apex. They built their own Apex. One of their early people they brought through was this guy named Brad Schwartz. So his resume is West Point, Green Beret, Wharton Business School. And he comes in to run this. I think $8 million revenue business. And fast forward, he's running a $500 million.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, we're capitalizing. You're just putting the money But it's not quite that bad because we're pretty quickly buying companies that have EBITDA that we're using to fund the businesses. So they're cash flow positive pretty quickly. So this particular deal, one of the early things we figured out is you said there's a lot of HVAC companies, but we figured out that every competitor in HVAC was doing the same thing. They were buying the $5 to $10 million EBITDA business that had a great management team. They were all buying that same company. It turns out 90% of the market is below that. And management wants to leave and cash out. And so we said, why don't we build a system to go buy that company? And that included talent was a huge lever.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the platform, yeah. The Hold Co is the platform. Our best companies we've really overinvested early in those platforms. It's really expensive to do that. And we have platforms that are pretty young that have a $15 million whole co expense. But that's really your foundation going forward.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have the best playbook in the world. So you're starting to architect what does that look like before you even have bought a company? So we're hiring the CEO, getting the industry right, we're getting the management part of the management team right, and then we're getting the playbook right before we've ever even written a check. Then we start going and buying companies. The first couple we try to buy pretty small. I think our first deal here was $8 million of EBITDA. And we learned a ton and we bought another one that was like two of EBITDA building along the way. And then we're also building our hold co. So we're building out the CEO, CFO, Chief People Officer.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, exactly. This guy, AJ Brown, was a CEO in training. We put him into be CFO of one of our companies. He did great there. We sold the business. We repatriated him. We said, okay, you're ready for prime time. You're going to be the CEO of a platform. And then we paired him with another CEO and training that was just coming. And this guy, Will Matson. So they become president and CEO or CEO and CFO initially. We picked HVAC. We had a little experience in that space. They were excited about that space. And then we started just going and visiting tons of companies. And when you go visit 20 companies in the space, you learn more in one three hour management visit than you do in three weeks in a conference room. And then what you're picking up in those meetings is what is great look like? And what's cool about it, each company probably does one thing great. The company does recruiting great. This company does purchasing, training, marketing, IT systems they use and how sophisticated they are with them. But if you add that up across 20 companies and you grab every single piece of that place.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A word you hear a lot So, for us, it means roll up, and I'll use our best example. So we started off in plumbing and HVAC, and we had this guy named.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A platform company, we install our own team pretty much 100% of the time. Every rule can have an exception. Someone could be amazing. Yeah, exactly. So if they're coachable and they want to run through walls and meet our criteria that we would have otherwise, certainly that would even be easier. But historically, last, I don't know, four funds, we've replaced the management 100% time. And we're super upfront going in. We're saying, hey, you want to cash out and go hang out on your boat and whatever. Great.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was so much fun. And so at one point, we just said, let's just do that every time from this point forward. Let's just put our own team in 100% of the time. And we burn the boats. Brutal to burn those boats because bankers don't sell companies that don't have management teams. So we had to rebuild an entire sourcing engine to do that. We had to change our brand in the market. We're the brand now if you don't want to continue, you call Albine as opposed to the other private equity firms that will back the founder. It was really, really brutal to make that change. But yeah, we made that change around 2010.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not like the founder who says, Oh, yeah, oh, great idea, Patrick, and they're writing it down. You just know it's never going to happen. It's the opposite of that.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those were our very, very best deals. Mike Duran ran one. The guy named Josh Greenberg ran one, and then Mark Strout ran one. At one point, I can still remember where I was when we had this conversation. Those were also, by the way, the most fun, most fun board meetings. So you're sitting literally with your friend talking about how you're just going to just crush this crank. And you know when you walk out of that meeting, they're going to do it.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We got in when we were in the recession and we had all this time to kind of look back at our track record, the best deals that we did were always ones where we put in either us or someone just like us to go run this business who knew nothing about the industry but had these raw talent and also coachability to like say, hey, I don't know everything. So who do I learn from? Not this grizzled veteran that's already knows everything about the industry, but I'm going to look at things differently and fresh. And by the way, I'm going to just run through walls.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that is a mental part of this. Yeah, that's right, Patrick. That is core. So the way it came about was in the early days, we were doing all kinds of things. A number of businesses going well. So one of us would go out and run the company. So Sanner, one of my partners today, removed to Detroit for like a year. Will Adams moved to Maine for two years to run this horrible business? And a guy named Mike Duran was in Chicago. I ran one of our companies, a slot machine business for a while.”
2025-05-27 · Invest Like the Best · Graham Weaver - Building Alpine - [Invest Like the Best, EP.425] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source