The First Step Starts With Us
We can help you decide what’s next for you. And your company.
Leave A Legacy
SELLING YOUR BUSINESS
Selling your business isn’t easy. We know how hard you’ve worked, how much of your life you’ve invested in it. Now you’re thinking about options and what’s next. There’s excitement, stress and maybe even some guilt. We get it. We can help. It starts with a relationship built on trust, integrity and experience.
Make An Impact
JOIN OUR TEAM
Running a business is challenging. If you’ve always wanted to lead a company, why not earn the opportunity to lead one of ours? We’re always looking for dedicated, passionate people who believe they have what it takes.
What Our People Say
There was so much trust and confidence in dealing with Chenmark. Selling to them was the right decision for me.
Rarely in business do you get an opportunity to have such an impact with each and every project.
For any owner who’s looking to sell but wants to keep their dream alive while ensuring the well-being of their staff, talk to Chenmark.
Chenmark is a family business and we were a family business, so for us it was a great fit.
Weekly Thoughts
Managing Uncertainty
Last week we covered how our goal at Chenmark is to underwrite deals so that we continually acquire companies that demonstrate asymmetric payoff profiles. Ideally, when we “lose” we are muddling our way through, figuring out what is going wrong, and establishing a plan to do better in the future.
Managing Uncertainty
So far in our series on managing uncertainty we have discussed the importance of taking an expected value-based approach when making investment decisions and also covered why there are practical limits to a pure expected value methodology in the world of small business.
Managing Uncertainty
Last week, we went over some first principles concepts related to risk and uncertainty. The core idea was that if you have a strong understanding of the range of outcomes, the probabilities associated with those outcomes, and your ability to tolerate a negative result, you should consistently make positive expected value investments.
Managing Uncertainty
The last few months, we have spent quite a bit of time discussing potential acquisitions or deal underwriting more generally. While each of these conversations tends to focus on the idiosyncrasies of the company being evaluated, conceptually speaking, we are engaging in a form of betting exercise, where our challenge is to make the best possible decision despite having limited information and a high degree of uncertainty.
Stupid Is As Stupid Does
Lately, we are feeling our attention is scattered. With all that’s going on in the world combined with extra communication between multiple email accounts, numerous Slack channels, group text messages, FaceTimes, Zoom meetings, and phone calls, there is a lot of potential for distraction.
There’s No Such Thing As A Dragon
We recently finished Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. The author is controversial (which is great, as we enjoy reading books by controversial authors), and the book contains some thought-provoking concepts that we are still thinking through.
Risky Business
In acquisitions, we work with limited information. Small businesses often don’t have the cleanest financial records, so we do the best with what we’re given. Operational data may be non-existent. If it does exist, it is not likely to be presented in a user-friendly format.
Specifics, Bob
In the 1996 movie Phenomenon, John Travolta plays George Malley, a small-town guy who is inexplicably transformed into a genius with telekinetic powers. In one part of the movie, he is asked to answer, as quickly as he can, how old is a person born in 1928. Malley answers as follows:
Excellence Every Day
A family member has been in the hospital for a few weeks, and some of us have been spending time with her as much as possible. Apart from becoming very well acquainted with the food options around Massachusetts General Hospital (shout out to Tatte, Anna’s Taqueria, and Flour Bakery), we have also assisted on a fair number of walks around the hallway.
The Operator’s Handbook
As some of you may have listened to already, a few of us have been a guest on Alex Bridgeman’s Think Like An Owner podcast, a show dedicated to the exploration of investors and operators in the small business space. Due to the interest in the podcast, Alex is creating a new concept, The Operators Handbook, aimed at “documenting the experiences and challenges of small company operators.”