00:00:50 · Mikk, Ramsey Sahyoun
[00:00:50] S0: As I'm a former athlete myself, I was doing a research on you, and there is a video of you, like, recorded fourteen years ago, you playing golf. So is this another great story of an athlete turned into entrepreneur? [00:01:05] S1: Yeah. I I actually watched that video, and I think I buggy the hole from the middle of the fairway. So maybe it wasn't my wasn't my finest wasn't my finest performance. But yeah, I got a scholarship to play golf at USC. And we were a good, a really good program when I was there. And we were always a top 25 program in the country. And, I thought, basically, until kind of the the tail end of my college career, I thought I wanted to be a professional golfer. And I'd worked at that since, you know, since I was a kid, but realized that that I wasn't good enough to to make it a career. The the people who who make it play professional golf are incredible. And yeah, I just couldn't get to kind of that next level and had to get a real job, but I'm glad it worked out the way it did. [00:02:06] S0: Okay. Now you got your first experience with private equity after graduating college. Your boss there taught you the whole business, and you said you fell in love with it like right away. And this idea that you could buy private companies, you didn't even know that that was a thing. And now if we look what you have built, like you've you've come a long way. So tell us who is Ramsey and who is Jeff Totten, your cofounder, and the story of Evergreen, and we go from there into all the details.
00:02:37 · Ramsey Sahyoun
[00:02:37] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Sure. So, yeah, like I said, I I thought I wanted to be a professional golfer from, god, the time I was, I don't know, probably nine years old or something. And so that kinda consumed my life for the subsequent ten to twelve years. And then, yeah, like you said, yeah. But by by the end of my college career, I realized golf wasn't gonna be my career. I I initially took an unpaid internship at a firm after I graduated college, so it's pretty bad to, like, graduate college and and take an unpaid internship. But I had to had to start working a normal job somehow, and I I got this opportunity at a firm called Revolution Capital Group, and, you know, they they were fundless sponsor doing kind of more distressed deals and carve outs. And I was tasked with cold calling bankers and business owners trying to find acquisition opportunities. And, yeah, I just learned the business of buying private companies. At Revolution, they would hardly put any equity into the deals that they did, and I think that kind of blew my mind. Like you could put in basically no equity, but own 100% of a business. So it was like a free option on the upside of that business. So yeah, that blew my mind, and I learned the business there. And then about a year into that, I got the opportunity to join Alpine Investors. Alpine was building out their sourcing team at the time. I think I was the second person they hired on... When they were building out a dedicated sourcing team, because historically, everyone would kinda do some sourcing, and then they would do deal execution, and they would sit on a few boards, and they just found that their pipeline was not consistent because they didn't have... Know, they would get busy on a deal, and then and then the pipeline would dry up, and then that deal would get done, and then you'd be back to sourcing, so it was just kinda lumpy. And so they recognized pretty early on the need to build out a dedicated sourcing function. So I I joined Alpine, and Jeff was the first person that sent an email to me welcoming me to the team, and, you know, I I spent three years doing doing sourcing at Alpine, and Jeff and I got to work closely together on on a number of on a number of deals at Alpine, many of which went went really well, and we just had a lot of fun working together.
00:05:27 · Ramsey Sahyoun, Mikk
And then we we both kinda realized we had a a passion for Berkshire Hathaway and read all the Warren Buffett's shareholder letters, and eventually, together with a number of other folks, made the trip to Omaha for Berkshire. And yeah, that kind of all came together from there. But yeah, that was kind of how we met and how we got started. [00:05:53] S0: Okay. And it all got started, like the first acquisition was in December thirty one in twenty seventeen. Could you give us an overview of the portfolio today as of end of first quarter of twenty twenty six?
00:05:53 · Mikk, Ramsey Sahyoun
[00:05:53] S0: Okay. And it all got started, like the first acquisition was in December thirty one in twenty seventeen. Could you give us an overview of the portfolio today as of end of first quarter of twenty twenty six? [00:06:07] S1: Sure, sure. Yeah. So we're focused on technology services businesses. We've acquired 160 companies that were very decentralized. So you know, we've done a few tuck in acquisitions over over the years, but for the most part, we we buy businesses and operate them independently. So we've got, you know, call it a 130 independent brands. And then we have three types of companies that we invest in within technology services. The biggest of those is MSPs. So MSPs are companies that provide outsourced IT for small and medium sized businesses. That's under LIRA. So that's our holding company for MSPs. The second area that we focus on is ERP consulting and implementation. So companies that help help you implement and support, you know, ERP application. And that is within our pine. We we call these groves. Each each of our business areas, we call them groves sticking with the tree theme. But pine is ERP consulting. And then Cedar is government. So these are a variety of companies that provide IT solutions to different government agencies from, you know, federal government agencies in The US to state and local and municipalities as well. So those are kind of the three business areas that that that we focus on. MSPs are are the biggest. It's probably about 70% of of the overall business. And then the remainder is split between pine and cedar.
00:07:55 · Mikk
[00:07:55] S0: Now about the early days. When we met in Stockholm, we were discussing a bit, like, you said you leaving... You and Jeff leaving Alpine. So could you could you share the story? Like, how how did you come up with the idea? And you said they were extremely supportive, and now you're also part of the Alpine. So how was the story in early days?
00:08:14 · Ramsey Sahyoun
[00:08:14] S1: Yeah. Yeah. Let's see. So so we had the inspiration after after the Berkshire meeting is when we really had this inspiration to start a holding company. And Jeff actually wrote Graham Weaver, the kind of pitch for Evergreen when we're on the flight back from from Omaha to San Francisco. And then one thing kinda led to another, and and we kinda made this pitch to aggregate service companies under a holding company, we didn't specify an industry. And then one of one of the... That the main piece of guidance that Alpine gave at that time was, hey, pick an industry that you like and focus on it, and get really good at buying and operating companies in that industry. So I remember, you know, we had a... We we We pursued a number of different industries. We actually had an opportunity in the MSP space, and we had an opportunity in another industry. And I remember, you know, it was probably around December 2017, we made the decision to kind of go pencils down that other industry and focus on MSPs and get really good at that. So that was kind of how it came about. But yeah, I think I... It never, like, felt like we were leaving Alpine necessarily. Like, we were we were leaving, like, working at the head office of the private equity firm, and we were essentially going out into the portfolio, but we were doing it with their their full kind of backing and support, and we were aligned on the thesis and everything. So, you know, it it really felt like they were backing us to go do something versus us leaving and they happen to raise... Like, give us capital, like it was... We were kind of aligned, you know, the the whole way through.