Positive Enterprise Value

On this episode of the Positive Enterprise Value podcast, I am thrilled to have as my guests, my friends and clients, Dave and Cindy Francis, who have kind of a hero's journey to tell you about.

Dave and Cindy have had many chapters in their journey as entrepreneurs. They started out with Cindy growing up in the family business, Fowler High Precision, which was run by her dad, Fred Fowler, who himself was a second-generation owner. Cindy tells us a little bit of the story about what that was like growing up with her dad as a wild man entrepreneur, getting together and then marrying Dave and their journey thus far.

They go on to share when Dave initially joined the business, but ultimately decided to leave and how he and Cindy moved to the middle part of the country. Having some entrepreneurial experiences, they decided to go out on their own, and then moved back to the East coast and started a different company. And then, finally, when Cindy's father, Fred, was diagnosed with a terminal illness, we hear about Dave coming back into the business in the breach, theoretically temporarily, to solve some problems with the business, and now just having come through a very successful recapitalization, they share with us about their dreams and hopes for the next chapter.

I think Dave and Cindy have a story that is particularly rich with lessons, comedy, humor, things to focus on, things not to do, and I have no doubt that any Entrepreneur Owner-Manager, or aspiring entrepreneur will get a hell of a lot out of it. I sure hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoy bringing it to you.

Today’s interviewee on this episode of the Positive Enterprise Value Podcast is Heidi Feinstein. Heidi is the CEO of Hearth Food Garden, a startup business in formation which will open its European style food market on the street level of 60 Penhallow Street in downtown Portsmouth, New Hampshire sometime in late 2022.

Heidi, whose warmth and charisma oozes through in this podcast, previously was a super successful restaurateur as the Founder and CEO of Life Alive Cafes, which she called the Life Alive Urban Oasis and Organic Cafes, which she built into a very significant and successful business in the Boston area over 10 to 12 years.

Heidi and I talk about her background, some of her hopes and dreams for the Hearth Food Garden, as well as some of the things that she's learned along the way with Life Alive and other places. You'll hear her laugh about some of her learnings, some unlearnings, and some of her plans for how the Hearth Food Garden will actually be different than what she created with Life Alive.

I hope you'll enjoy this interview with Heidi as much as I did.

On today’s episode of the Positive Enterprise Value podcast I am interviewing, Jennifer A. Grossman who goes by the nickname JAG. JAG is the President and CEO of The Atlas Society. JAG lives in Malibu and travels so extensively, I'm not sure that she would say they have a headquarters every- anywhere. As you might have guessed from the name, The Atlas Society, which is, drawn from the book Atlas Shrugged, the fantastic novel by Ayn Rand. The Atlas Society celebrates the remarkable potential and power of the individual and promotes learning about the capitalist system juxtaposed against the other kinds of systems in the world, so that young people in particular can make informed choices about which is the kind of system they want to live in and whether they're willing to make the decisions that allow them to be successful in a capitalist society.

JAG is a fabulously interesting person who, after an Ivy League education at Harvard, spent time at the White House as a speech writer. She also spent time in the private sector. She has also advised other for profit and non-for-profit entities. I think she's been with Atlas about six or seven years. She's made enormous transformable- transformative changes there moving their curriculum to focus a lot of resources on young people and is very open and candid about her challenges in doing so over the last few years. And I think you'll really enjoy hearing her so without further delay, here's my interview with Jennifer A. Grossman, JAG.

My guest today on the Positive Enterprise Value podcast is Dr. George Shapiro. George is the Chief Medical Innovation Officer of Fountain Life. Fountain was formed about three years ago, with the mission to revolutionize the current healthcare system (actually I would call it the sick care system), by switching the primary focus from a sick care reactive system to a pro-active and preventative healthcare system. All the advancements that have been made in technology and AI, now allow us to detect illnesses earlier than ever before, so that we could have the possibility of living much longer, healthier lives—really interesting, but it takes a long time to find its way to your general practitioner.

George Shapiro, M.D. had a traditional education and background in medicine. He went to New York Medical College where he received his M.D. He had his undergraduate degree from the Albert Einstein College at Yeshiva University, and he then became a fellow at Columbia University in the cardiology center. George, in my view, has kind of seen it all. He's seen people practice by focusing on the symptoms, which it seems like is what our mass popular culture and the sick care system especially is focused on. I mean, I'm sure you have the same stories that I do when you go to see a practitioner and really all they address is what symptoms you're having and I think George would say, "Wow, the technology we have allows you to look at your health care pre-symptom. Why would you wait until the engine in your car seizes up until you go get it fixed? Why wouldn't you have a low oil indicator go off before, and actually go get that fixed before it seized up?"

George is very, very skilled in this area and has a lot of scar tissue from the traditional medical system. I hope you'll have fun listening to him. So, without further delay please join me in listening to George Shapiro, M.D. from Fountain Life.

Today, my guests are Don Oakes and Fran Philip, who came to be entrepreneurs in the second chapter of their professional lives. Both Don and Fran were very successful senior executives with L.L. Bean. Fran, ultimately, was the chief merchandising officer, and Don worked in senior positions in creative and brand. Fran has a great deal of professional governance experience not only with private companies where she's very active, but also with public companies with firms including Vista Outdoor, Vera Bradley, and PacSun.

About 10 years ago, they departed L.L. Bean for different reasons, and you'll hear them talk about how Fran called Don one day and said, "I've got this interesting business. I think we could make an investment in it or maybe even acquire most of and we could run it and it's called Maine's Sea Bags." And I think Don probably heard that discussion with a teensy bit of professional skepticism after being a senior executive of a more than a billion-dollar company and said, "Well, Fran, how many stores do they have at Sea Bags?" And she said, "Three." He said, "What do they do?" And she said, "They make tote bags out of used sails from sailboats."

So, I think what you're going to hear we have a double-barrel interview today because we'll hear both Don and Fran talk about their individual experiences, some of their insights and ideas that they shared with each other, some of the ways that they work in different seasons of the year (believe it or not), and some of their hopes and dreams for Sea Bags. Sea Bags now, by the way, is a very widely known national consumer brand with more than just bags, and I think probably as of this recording, 50 retail stores, in addition to a very robust online presence.

So, listen and learn. I hope you enjoy listening to Don and Fran. I sure enjoyed having them on the podcast.

In the Positive Enterprise Value Podcast, we have the fun of interviewing and listening to some of the most seasoned, successful Entrepreneur Owner-Managers on the planet. The journey through their lives and through their enterprises, through their communities, through their families, and in their successes they leave behind breadcrumbs for us to see and to examine. This week, I have the fun of interviewing my friends Barbara and Ed Wilson, the founders of Wilson Language Training.

Wilson Language Training is the most widely known firm to provide curriculum or pedagogy for teaching students, dyslexic students, how to read. And, perhaps even more importantly, how to teach teachers how to teach dyslexic students how to read. You'll hear from Barbara and Ed how they began their business, basically as a coaching or tutoring operation teaching a few dozen kids at a time, and realized the massive scale of demand of the millions of students who needed their help to learn how to read across the country and around the world.

They generously and candidly share with us stories from their 38 years of marriage and their 35 years of running this business, including trying to attract and retain great talent; some of the foibles of trying to work with school systems across the country; their very clever, almost intuitive, sense of setting the company up to really scale; and a bit about a recent event where Bigelow helped them to architect a recapitalization with Alpine Equity Partners, which specializes, among other things, in education businesses. I hope you enjoy this session with Ed and Barbara as much as I do. I think you'll hear their authentic kindness come out in the podcast, as well as their perspicacity, their attention to detail, and their mastery of their domain.

UPDATE

Today, I had the fun of interviewing Jason and Amy Case. Founded by Jason Case in 2009 and headquartered in southern Massachusetts, Case Facilities Management Solutions has grown rapidly to become a leading tech-enabled service provider for snow and ice management, landscaping, sweeping, and janitorial services for over 10,000 customer sites. Case FMS utilizes a proprietary technology platform and a hybrid service delivery model to provide services for the healthcare, financial services, supermarket chain, convenience store, transportation and retail industries.

This podcast was recorded on February 8th, 2022, in the home of Jason and Amy Case. I had the fun of interviewing them together as we talked about the founding of their company, and the founding of their relationship and their family, all of which was widely watched since together they were the winners of the 23rd season of CBS’ “The Amazing Race.”

So, let's listen and learn from these real-life stories of Jason and Amy Case. Maybe we'll even see a little of ourselves in this interview. Hope you enjoy it.

Most of our podcast interviews have been with CEO’s of mature, highly successful enterprises. Today, we have the fun of interviewing Bill Kapp, MD who is the CEO of a two year old startup—Fountain Life. Fountain, originally conceived by Tony Robbins and Peter Diamandis is bringing together state of the art therapies with world class practitioners to address health span—not merely lifespan, but health span.

If you are accustomed to thinking about your personal or family’s health in a “sick care” model, where you only seek care once symptoms of a problem have appeared, then I expect you will be challenged by Fountain Life’s proactive model.

I appreciate Bill’s expertise of exponentially changing, state of the art scientific medicine, combined with his 30 plus years of practical application.  Listen and learn.

Today we have done something different, and to make it easy for Positive Enterprise Value podcast listeners, we are recording this blog post as an audio only. Hope you enjoy it.

This week I am speaking to you about the private transaction market. We are in a time of abundance Superabundance of capital. Private company enterprise values are approaching all-time highs. And with good reason. Entrepreneur Owner-Managers create the most pro-social and pro-economic enterprises on the planet, and their superior financial performance coupled with increased capital gain value, result in the highest return on investment. Privately-owned companies have been undervalued all our professional lives. We are simply in a period of catch up. Think private company values are high? It’s only the tip of the iceberg.