What interests me is whether a thing will still be standing when I am no longer in the room. Value is the obsession. Execution is where it stops being an idea. Legacy is the only reason any of it is worth the trouble.
Most of the last twenty years were spent inside companies rather than beside them, which is a different discipline and a less comfortable one. I have bought five. I have examined more than a hundred others closely enough to form a view and declined almost all of them.
The word
Locuples is locus and plenus. Full of places. In early Rome a man's wealth was his livestock and the ground he held, so to be wealthy was to hold land, and a locuples was one who held a great deal of it.
The same word carried a second meaning, which was trustworthy. A witness whose account could be relied on. A guarantor good for what he had promised. Wealth and credibility were one word because nobody had yet worked out how they could be two.
Acquired
Side
Buy and sell, in roughly equal measure.
Where I started
I started in banking, and it is still the most useful training I have had. A lender reads a business by what could go wrong with it rather than by what its owner hopes will go right. A buyer reads it exactly the same way. Most of my work since has been finding what a buyer would find, and dealing with it before they do.
Where the work has gone since
Banking and financial services, manufacturing, healthcare, technology, professional services, real estate and property, education and training, logistics and supply chain, hospitality, environmental services. I have never thought the sector was the interesting part.
Where I have been
I was born in Jamaica and I am Canadian. I have lived in Estonia, in the Czech Republic, and now in England.
Canada, Estonia, the Czech Republic and England are also the four jurisdictions in the record above. Buying a company in every country I have settled in was never a plan and I would not offer it as a strategy. It has left me wary of advice from people who have only ever done deals inside one legal system.
At present
I read a great deal of law, largely because I grew tired of paying other people to explain documents I was perfectly capable of reading myself.
What occupies me now is working out what makes a private company genuinely transferable, as distinct from merely profitable. I have not finished thinking about it, and I am no longer confident the question has a general answer.
Most operational problems turn out to be leadership problems wearing a disguise.
What a buyer pays for is the probability that the revenue survives the owner's departure.