607+ acquisitions and a death by 1,000 cuts

Business Buyers & Builders,

Coming to you with a making it vs. not making it type of post…

Making it in the way of achieving the highest MOIC and IRR possible; which leads me to today’s topic:

A death by 1,000 cuts and protecting the quality of your thinking

As an investor, capital allocator, or someone acquiring a company, you know it’s not one job - it’s a set of parallel jobs that must all compound over time.

1) Deal sourcing (always on) - If you don’t have deal flow, nothing else matters.

• Building relationships with brokers (not just blasting emails)

• Direct outreach to owner-operators (letters, calls, referrals)

• Networking with accountants, lawyers, wealth advisers

• Staying top-of-mind with intermediaries

• Tracking deals in a CRM

This should be a daily or weekly habit.

2) Capital relationships (before you need them)

Fundraising < trust building

Investors back operators long before they back deals, you want to be talking to potential investors even when you’re not raising.

• Sharing deal thoughts and lessons learned

• Building a small but aligned investor base

• Do they want to direct invest and be allocated to the space? If so, can you determine check size and the decision-making process? Have they invested in the space before? I’m mostly thinking in the context of high net worth types and family offices here.

3) Operating your existing company(ies) — this is the track record in real time.

4) Underwriting, research, and pattern recognition (quiet, daily work)

You study your craft.

• Developing an investment thesis - are you targeted or focused on a specific industry?

• Learning industry specifics by meeting people active in the industry

• Are you focused on a certain geography, why? What are the strengths and weaknesses and stakeholders “in the know” that you should be building relationships with?

I could go on and on describing the various tasks you should be doing in order to succeed in buying and building great companies.

One last thing I’ll add before talking about the whole point of this…

5) Your personal time

Understanding that, in many cases, your brain and your knowledge about a certain thing are the bottleneck.

What are the core activities to get better?

• Protecting time allocated to deep work

• Eliminating low-value decisions

• Building routines and constraints

• Avoiding constant context switching

  • Be open minded sure, but avoid shiny object syndrome

• Staying physically and mentally sharp (!)

You know what I write about, but did you also know that productivity is rarely destroyed by a single catastrophic event?

Instead, it erodes quietly through what can be described as a death by 1,000 cuts…

Very small, seemingly harmless interruptions that accumulate over time and slowly drain focus, energy, and output.

Many folks assume that if productivity breaks down, it will be because of something big:

• a crisis

• a major distraction

• or a significant time commitment

No…

In reality, it’s the endless stream of tiny tasks and decisions - each one “only a minute” - that does the real damage.

A quick email, finding a charger, deciding what to eat, stepping out for coffee…

Your productivity is not measured in minutes spent; it’s measured in quality of focus and depth of concentration.

Each interruption pulls you out of a focused mental state.

And getting back into that state can take 30 minutes, an hour, or more. The true cost of small disruptions is not the time they take, but the mental bandwidth they consume and the momentum they destroy. You don’t allow compounding to do its magic.

Here’s a very simple but powerful exercise: track time in 30-minute blocks for a full week, from waking to sleeping. This creates an honest picture of where your time actually goes.

Once patterns are visible, the goal is not to become more efficient at everything - but to eliminate waste entirely. Productivity mastery comes from doing less, not more.

In the end, whether you invest, buy, or operate companies, your productivity comes down to focus.

The businesses and individuals who win are those who protect their attention, eliminate unnecessary friction, and channel uninterrupted energy into the few activities that truly matter.

From a real time capital allocator

A total eye-opener for me was a conversation that I had with Anthony Pompliano (he’s on this list reading as well). He runs a portfolio of various companies, from crypto to events to direct investments in boring cash flow businesses in various sectors. He also puts out one long interview per day, a daily newsletter to 200k investors and clients, daily news videos for his audience, and up to 10 high-quality tweets on X.

When asked how many people are on the media team, he said only one editor who helps with the podcast. Everything else is done by himself, mostly finished by 10 am ET. Following him for years, I think I’m right when I say he hasn’t missed a day. Good luck competing with a person like this. My view on productivity changed on that call.

To sum up: avoid the 1,000 small cuts. Remove what doesn’t serve the core mission. Focus up, let compounding work its magic.

Keep the main thing the main thing…and let everything else go.

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This below is great lessons for someone whose company is producing elegant amount of free cash flow:

There is a gentleman who 27 years ago imported the very first container full of mandarins.

His best mates started calling him “Mandarin”

Today, they still call him “Mandarin,” but the firm imports all sorts of fruits and vegetables and does over $32M in topline and $6M+ in EBITDA.

There is a HUGE lesson for you in this story:

How many traditional business owners do you know who make millions in profit and decide to hire an experienced CIO (Chief Investment Officer) to manage their assets on the same balance sheet?

I met a gentleman who did that 15 years ago. Got some details about their 2025 numbers: they do over $10m in net profits, of which over 70% comes from their diversified portfolio encompassing listed equities, private equity, hedge funds, and real estate.

Super smart. I know a few cases, but it would be great to see more of that. Which leads me to how you can do it: starting small, starting today. Keep reading:

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Haven’t hired a CIO for your portfolio but still have a desire to invest in cash-flow- positive traditional businesses?

Or at least a desire to look at the deals?

Take the today's sponsor, CapitalPad, gives you great access to SMB acquisitions for free. (You never know when you’ll find your next great investment, right?)

They’ve built a marketplace for acquisition entrepreneurs and the investors who back them.

They handle the messy part:

• standardized terms,

• governance,

• and distributions

In short, they professionalize investing in small businesses, you can simply READ and see all the deals.

So if you want exposure to acquisition deals, go to CapitalPad.com

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I recently invited Justin Ishbia to come on the podcast. Why him you may ask?

Well, there was a period at Shore Capital Partners (before raising an even larger fund; today $13B AUM) when their track record looked like this:

Them buying companies with enterprise values in the $1–10 million range and executing a disciplined roll-up strategy.

• 586 transactions

• buying $1-$10 million EV companies

• executing a disciplined roll-up strategy

• generate a median return of roughly 5.5x

• ca 72% IRR

He has made three rare public appearances on Forbes, and on Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s and Harry Stebbings’ podcasts. I sent him a DM to invite him to do another episode.

Justin was kind enough to reply and said he’d already done a few podcasts in 2025, but asked me to check back in early 2026.

Rather than letting the conversation end there, I decided to use the time to study his work so I’d be fully prepared if we ever record an episode in the future.

Here are the links to Apple podcast, Spotify and YouTube.

That’s all for today.

Thanks a lot for reading and I’ll talk to you again very soon.

Take care,

PrivateEquityGuy / Mike Markus