Brent Beshore is the CEO and founder of Permanent Equity, a private equity fund uniquely focused on the long-term.
In this episode, we dive into Brent’s journey into private equity, the value of operational experience as an investor, the diligence process, leadership, and the importance of long-term relationships and compounding.
Please enjoy our conversation with Brent Beshore.
The Investipal Podcast is produced by www.investipal.co. Past guests include Peter Lazaroff, Douglas Boneparth, Jamie Hopkins, Tyrone Ross and many more.
Follow us on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/investipal | www.linkedin.com/in/cameronhowe/; Twitter: www.twitter.com/camhowe16 | www.twitter.com/investipal; Tiktok: www.tiktok.com/@camhowe16 | www.tiktok.com/@investipal; or Instagram: www.instagram.com/investipal/
Find Brent Beshore at:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/brentbeshore/
https://twitter.com/BrentBeshore
https://www.permanentequity.com/
https://www.permanentequity.com/content/how-to-acquire-your-first-smaller-company
https://www.mainstreetsummit.com/
Other links mentioned:
https://www.giantworldwide.com/
https://www.amazon.com/100X-Leader-How-People-Follow/dp/1119519442
00:00 Introduction and Background
03:07 The Value of Operational Experience in Private Equity
09:09 Building Long-Term Relationships and Healthy Cultures
17:37 Advice for Buying Small Businesses
27:31 Understanding Personality Types for Effective Leadership
31:13 Assuming Risks and Being Properly Compensated in Small Business Investing
Cameron Howe
Hi everyone, welcome back to the Investipal podcast. My guest today is Brent Beshore. Brent is the CEO and founder of Permanent Equity, a PE fund investing in private companies, deliberately built for long-term success. Brent, thank you for coming on today.
Brent Beshore
Hey, thanks for having me on, Cameron. Appreciate it. So your story is very interesting. I heard you once shared you stumbled into the career of private equity and even Googled "what is due diligence" during your first acquisition. So, for our listeners who are not as familiar, could you run us through a little bit of your background and your story and how you got into this space?
Yeah. I joke that I'm the Forrest Gump of private equity for a reason. I feel like I kind of fell backwards into it. I was getting my law degree and my MBA at Mizzou here in Columbia, Missouri, which is where my wife and I ultimately ended up looking at each other about seven years in and saying, "I guess we live here." We never intended to, but we love it. It's a college town. It's awesome.
So yeah, I started a business out of school, and that went okay. Then I had an opportunity to buy a business unexpectedly. So, I used the SBA program and bought a business, and it went great. I mean, lots of stumbles, lots of trials and tribulations, and I learned more in the first couple of years of that than I've learned probably in the rest of my life. But it went well, paid back the loan early, and looked at it and said, "Hey, do more of what works and less of what doesn't."
So at that time, and this is like 2010, 2011, I was really trying to research what is going on in the space. There's obviously traditional private equity. I looked at that model and as an operator, I said, "Man, it doesn't make much sense to try to lever something up and cut a bunch of costs and then try to resell it to somebody within a short period of time." It didn't seem like a fantastic operating model. You certainly could make money doing it, and private equity historically has been successful at that, but it didn't seem like a way that I wanted to live my life and something I wanted to pursue.
So I started looking and said, "Who else is out there buying small to medium-sized businesses? What's the market for these businesses?" And at the time there wasn't a lot of information out there. So early on, I started talking about it on the internet and said, "I think this is what I want to do for the rest of my career," and the rest is history. So I bought more businesses on our own.
Cameron Howe
Probably operated the world's smallest family office there for almost a decade. And then raised $50 million in 2017, 2019, in a very unusual structure, unusual in the hold time, unusual in the fee structure, unusual in every way. So it's been wonderful. I think we've selected for an incredible group of investors. We've grown from a handful of companies to 15 now and soon to be 16. We've got a great team. Almost all of us are here in Columbia, Missouri.
So Brent, with your background in the operational space first, do you think that was a big benefit in terms of how you operate the PE fund? Because just for further explanation, I chat with a lot of VCs and a lot of investors in the space and a lot say they help founders, they say they help operators, but have never actually really experienced those pain points. Do you think that background you had on actually launching your first business has been able both on the due diligence side to help out, but also in terms of how you operate these acquisition targets?
Brent Beshore
Yeah, I mean, I would say it's been beneficial in a lot of ways. The traditional investing skillset, you know, I've got a lot of friends that are, I would call, real investors. I wouldn't call myself a real investor. The math on the spreadsheet's pretty straightforward when you don't use debt, and you're buying at fairly low multiples, you don't need a lot of spreadsheet math to tell you that the investment's going to work out if you can continue the business forward.
The real skill set in our area of the market is can you understand the business and the people, and can you marshal resources in post-close operations to make things successful? One of the things I like to say is that all businesses are loosely functioning disasters and some happen to make money, and you can only know that if you've actually operated a business. To most investors, that sounds crazy, scary, and that's why, when a lot of investors in the public markets or up market look at the market for small to medium-sized businesses, they say, "Man, this is a gold mine. Why isn't everyone buying a small business?" And the gap is in the skills.
So yeah, it doesn't take a genius to know that if you can buy at a five-times multiple on free cash flow and increase the quality of the business, you'll make good money. There's gold in the hills. The problem is the digging. Usually, the people with the skill set don't have the money, and usually, the people with the money don't have the skill set or the patience or the tenacity to do it. So it's a pretty difficult mismatch in this area of the market. There are far more sellers that need help selling than there are buyers who have the actual skill set to take down these companies and to treat them well over a long period of time.
I mean, there are a lot of different ways to do it. The search fund model has done it. There's what I'd call the country club deal market that is largely operating in this area of the market. There are some private equity funds that are going down in this area of the market, although it's just really difficult in the traditional two and 20 model to stay in this area of the market. What happens most of the time with professional investors is that if they're successful, they end up moving up market. And if they're not successful, then they end up not being able to raise more capital. So you see a lot of churn of the types of investors that enter and exit into the small business market.
So I think it was incredibly valuable. I can't imagine going into this area of the market with a skill set that is non-operational and trying to make a go of it.
Cameron Howe
And with that, I've noticed, you know, taking a look at your portfolio companies, there is a very wide array of the types of companies you own. You know, like for instance, I see a fence company and then right beside that a marketing tech company. So drilling into that a little bit, how do you think about your investment philosophy and making some of these asymmetrical bets in terms of, it's not within one set industry? It looks like it's quite broad in terms of your approach to evaluating companies and investing in.
Brent Beshore
Yeah, so our philosophy is that we think that there are interesting little pockets and niches in a lot of industries that are defensible, that have some sort of moat being defined as sustainable above-average returns on invested capital. And so for us, there's so many types of businesses or so many different niches that we can't have a thesis and go out there and say, "Okay, we're going to go pursue this, this, this, and this." We just don't have that many good ideas. We see a good idea when it comes to us.
What we like to do is instead specialize in what we call the adolescent business, which is too big to be small, too small to be big. We're trying to help these businesses scale up. And by definition, if a business is small and it's been in existence for, you know, 10, 20, 30, maybe even 50 years, then there's something deficient about the way it's being run. So we're trying to figure out what are those lids on the business and then how do we release those lids over time?
We want to be active in the businesses, not in a way that's slash and burn or trying to turn the company into a completely different direction, but instead really trying to be supportive and say, "Okay, what resources, what talents need to be added?" And this may be obvious, but there's a real talent gap in smaller companies. Most people, not everyone, there are exceptions to the rule, but most people, if you can work for a larger company for higher pay, more prestige, you're going to do it.
Especially, you know, if you're in the business of serving small companies, if you're a service company and you can choose to work with Bob's plumbing shop or Google and, you know, Bob can pay you one-100th of what Google can pay you, you're probably going to work for Google. So again, the types of talents, the access to talent that's in this area is just challenging. It's challenging to grow. And a lot of these companies are insular in the sense that they're not recruiting outside talent that have seen it done elsewhere and done a good job. They're typically hiring from within, which is great. Again, there's nothing wrong with it, but it lacks a lot of the perspective and skillsets.
You get this sort of closed-off, insular culture that doesn't allow for the type of growth that I think would be ideal. So yeah, when we're coming into these companies, we're trying to be change agents, but with a very long-term mindset and highly supportive in how we challenge.
Cameron Howe
Very interesting. So with that, it essentially like you might come in with a Rolodex of people who can provide more of like a strategic
lens? You already have those individuals who are insular, who know how to operate the business, but then you can bring on parachutes and folks in who can focus more on actually building the business.
Brent Beshore
Yeah. So if we do our job right and we select correctly, then the company is excellent at what it does. The company is excellent, the thing itself. And then maybe needs help at the "everything tastes like chicken" layer, the business of business layer, right? Where it doesn't matter if you're in aerospace or you're in matchmaking or you're in fence building. It's all the same thing at the end of the day.
So yeah, we have a staff of 20-ish people that have a variety of skill sets and perspectives across a lot of different businesses that are of similar size. And when I say small, I want to be clear, this is not like the bagel shop, right? These are still legitimate, hefty businesses. These are businesses that sort of in local communities are seen as pillar organizations. So these are three, five, even up to $20 million of free cash flow businesses. So these are not small by any means in the traditional sense. These are very successful, but we think there's a lot more opportunity for a lot of them.
So we're coming in and we're saying, "Yeah, look, you all are excellent at what you do. We'll never know how to do the core action as well as you will, nor do we intend to. What we're trying to do is we're trying to come in and say, everyone needs marketing, advertising, lead generation, sales, technology. Everyone needs to have clean and actionable information. I mean, just the basics of how do you run a business? What does strategy look like? How do you think about planning? While also maintaining that anytime you put a plan out in the world, it's never going to look the same, you know, a month after you put it out there."
So it's a lot of that real-world experience that we get across all these companies to see what works and what doesn't. We have a catbird seat now to 15 companies that are operating in very different markets, very different geographies across the country. We're trying to figure out how can we take the best of what we learned over here and apply it over here? And how do we get people in touch to be able to do that? So yeah, we have a big Rolodex. We also have a team internally that's focused on that.
Cameron Howe
Interesting. And with that, I thought it was very interesting was looking at one of your tweets on how you think about portfolio construction, which is an area on the public equity side I spend a lot of time in terms of, like I look at the correlation of holdings and making sure everything's diversified. But to paraphrase a little bit of what that tweet said and how you think about it, you're essentially looking at seasonality factors. So if I have it right, you might own a fencing company on the East Coast and you might want to supplement that with a counter-cyclical investment maybe on the West Coast. So are you looking at your portfolio construction almost from a consistency of cash flow side of things where one might trail off in the winter months, but the other picks up?
Brent Beshore
Yeah, seasonality, I would say both intra-business and across the portfolio, is something that we think about. It's one of the factors, but what we're really trying to get is how correlated are these investments to one another, depending on what trends hit. COVID was actually a really interesting thing for us. It was a test for us. We looked and saw this, and not surprisingly, the thesis held up, which is we had about half our portfolio do much worse during COVID than we would have expected, and we had about half our portfolio do better.
Now, we didn't build the construction of the portfolio such that we were taking pandemic risk, right? That wasn't the thing that we were constructing for. But we're trying to look at and say, "Okay, do we want, we have a construction-focused grouping of businesses in Texas. You know, whenever we're looking to make a new investment, do we want to add to that risk of, let's say, weather in Texas as being one factor to it? Do we want to have all of our businesses get most of their business in the fourth quarter around Christmas time?"
Whatever the thing might be, there's a lot of the way these businesses can zig together or zag together or not. And so we're always just trying to be thoughtful about what does a portfolio look like and how durable will it be intra-year and then sort of between years as well. So it's not perfect by any means, but we're trying to be thoughtful about what we have and kind of how it affects the total portfolio construction.
Cameron Howe
That's very interesting. Yeah, it's a foreign world to me. I find that fascinating in terms of your thinking behind that. And so with that, I know you also stress the importance on, you know, when you're evaluating investment, how long-term relationships are very important to you, both in terms of, I guess, how you operate the business and also in terms of establishing probably relationships with your LPs. Could you share a personal experience that underscores why you think those long-term relationships are so important?
Brent Beshore
Yeah, relationships are everything. And it's impossible to make good long-term decisions with short-term capital. So I think it first starts in what you're enabled to do. It's impossible to treat people in a long-term healthy way if you have no ability to work with them for more than three to five years, which is sort of the traditional private equity window. And everyone turns into a screwdriver real quick when you're pulling your toolbox. People don't like that. I don't like that. I don't like feeling used. I'm sure you don't either, Cameron.
So I think for us, what we're trying to do is we're trying to treat people as people. They're messy. They're made in the image of God. We're trying to treat them as the unique, special human that they are, no matter what role they're in, no matter what their title is. And we're trying to ask them, "How do our desires and the desire of the firm overlap with how they want to contribute?" And we're trying to treat them with fairness and kindness. We're trying to show them that there's a way to be long-term and that we can work together for a long time.
Ultimately, we can't make somebody happy in their career, right? That's not our job. What we can do is enable the ability for them to be happy by giving them meaningful work that is secure and long-term and being transparent with them about performance and opportunities to improve and take on more responsibility. So really, at the end of the day, all we have is people. I mean, across all these businesses, and we want to treat them the best way we possibly can.
Cameron Howe
And does that also play a role in the involvement of that business owner or is the business owner typically like, sell to you and then they hit retirement mode?
Brent Beshore
We do it any which way. We had a 95-year-old sell to us. She said, "Hey, don't take this the wrong way, but I'm not interested in an earnout, not interested in an employment contract, not interested in doing hold. I am, I need to be out." And we said, "Totally understand," right? So that's a very different situation than we've partnered with people in their thirties, and they've said, "We want to work on this business for a long time. We need help and we want to be in long-term partnership."
Our ideal situation is we're not buying a hundred percent. We're typically buying between 51 and 70, 75% of the business, depending on the situation. And then we want the leadership to be heavily vested in the future success.
Cameron Howe
That's what we found has worked best for us. Your point on the leadership side there, I find very fascinating. I was an infantry officer in the Canadian military at 18, and I knew absolutely nothing. But that environment was very heavy-handed in terms of how you end up dealing with people. Fast forward to now being an operator of a business, I've really had to think through how I approach my relationships with people and just in terms of their communication styles.
I'm curious to hear your background on both from growing your own business as a small business and with Permanent Equity and how you deal with leaders at these companies you partner with. How has your leadership style evolved and what core values remained non-negotiable for you throughout that?
Brent Beshore
Yeah, I'd say my leadership styles changed a lot. I mean, I can relate to being young and not knowing anything. I was the leader of this business when I was in my early to mid-20s, and so I was a mess, man. I was full of fear and didn't know what I was doing and thought everyone's there to serve me. I found that the more that I aim to serve the people around me, the more that I can enjoy the fruits of that, let's put it that way. Relationships go a lot better when you're aimed to serve and not be served.
In terms of how I interact, I really try to understand the differences in people. Everyone assumes that everyone is operating the same way that we are. Really, as you look at different personality types, as you study Myers-Briggs or Enneagram, there's DISC, there's a bunch of these, all of them are imperfect. All of them are merely just a lens that you click over that kind of gives you some viewpoint that maybe you didn't have otherwise. It builds self-awareness and empathy. But as I started studying those,
it makes a huge difference how your default assumptions about the world works.
A big one is, are you future-oriented or present-oriented, and how that shows up at work is going to be radically different. The future-oriented person is always going to be about ideas about what could happen. They're going to start in the future and walk back towards the present. The present-oriented person is going to be the exact opposite. They're going to say, "Okay, what does this mean for me today? What are the things that are on my list, my checklist, and what is this new idea? How does that impact today?" And then they're going to slowly walk into the future.
Now, I used to have meetings with people and I'd say, "Here's where I think we should be," and I'd be excited. I'm future-oriented. So I'd get excited about the future. I'd get excited about where we're going. I'd be interested in taking them with me there. And they would be like, "Well, sure, but how are we going to deal with this accounting issue?" And I'm like, "I don't know, I don't care about the accounting issue. Like we're talking about this big thing." And by the way, I used to get frustrated by that. What I've really learned is that people bring different skills, and there's no right or wrong way. The person who's present-oriented has a lot to add, and they can see things that the future-oriented person can't. They are alert to things that the future person-oriented person is not, and vice versa. We need each other.
Whether it's that, whether it's thinking, feeling, whether it's how we make decisions, where we draw our energy from, there's all these different ways to move in this world. What we need to do is we need to understand one another and what strengths and weaknesses we're bringing to the table. I just look at it now as I want to assemble a group of maybe it's called like the X-Men, right? That each have their own specialties and talents. I want to honor the people for the talents they bring, and I want to not assume that they're going to bring the same talents and skills to the table that I am. That would be horrible if it was an organization full of just me, be chaos.
That's where the beauty of how we're designed is that we're designed for each other. We can't see ourselves clearly. We're kind of murky, but we can work for each other, right? We can see each other clearly. So, how I show up to work and how I try to interact with people is really just first and foremost, acknowledging that they're very likely different than I am, trying to understand who they are and trying to then properly position myself to speak to them. Again, what you say is not as important as how you say it. People know how you feel, it's very difficult to hide. We're excellent at understanding the nonverbal cues that people give off. Ultimately, what somebody hears is way more important than what you say.
Cameron Howe
So whatever way we're going about doing something, we got to be thoughtful about the other person. The more I can focus on the good of the other and less on sort of being self-concerned with the needs of me, the better life goes.
Brent Beshore
Absolutely. I've noticed that firsthand. You know, the Slack messages come across as short. It's the same message I might deliver over a Google Meet or a phone call. But the way that I can communicate with words instead of just being over text has a very different outcome with people.
Cameron Howe
Amen. So when you're building up a team, like maybe you're building up a team within one of your companies with that X-Men analogy, are you looking to strike a healthy balance, or is it more your job on the permanent equity side to think more long-term and the operators of that business to think more day-to-day?
Brent Beshore
Yeah. I mean, we're trying to figure out what are the roles that we need. So if you had a CEO whose job was to lead a dynamic changing organization and that person was highly present-oriented, it's gonna be impossible for that person to do the job well. Conversely, if you have a CFO of a sort of low-growth, steady business, the worst possible thing you could do is have that person be a dynamic future-oriented person.
Right? Like we don't want creative accounting. That's not the thing that we're after in any of the businesses. So it largely depends on the role that we have. It depends on the person's situation within that company, what we're looking for. We try to be thoughtful as we're looking at different situations and as we're looking at for different roles to see what people are really after.
Cameron Howe
I was listening to another podcast you had where you said, and your host with that said that no company is perfect. Every company you have ever seen is a complete mess. The best case has been like a medium level of messiness. What do you think an actual perfect company would operate like? What it'd be like a healthy balance between those sorts of personalities or is there something missing that's just not achievable?
Brent Beshore
Yeah. I mean, the thing missing from most companies is just the messiness that we all bring to the table. It depends on the level of healthiness of the individuals. Ultimately there's no way to have a healthy business without having healthy individuals. There's so few healthy people in this world. When I say healthy, don't mean physically healthy. Sure, that's part of it. We're holistic. It's not a body, mind, soul dichotomy. We're all embodied creatures, right? So physical health certainly impacts emotional, spiritual health, whatever it might be.
But really, when I see the messes inside most of these companies, it's a function of misunderstandings and hurt feelings and pride and anger and frustration and expectations that bring in, which are unvoiced demands on everyone else. You end up having a group of healthy people that are all messy getting together. Turns out that mess is exponential from what it is on a sort of one-to-one basis.
This is why communication compounds and its complexity, the complexity of interpersonal and cultural challenges, the politics of all these companies as you grow them. You have to be very, very careful to spend a lot of time and a lot of effort on maintaining healthy cultures and a clear vision that everyone can get behind. People, by definition, I'm no different. You get into your own self, you get into your own world, and it's easy to lose your way pretty quickly.
The biggest thing that I think that we're trying to bring, and certainly imperfectly ourselves, is a level of health and awareness to again, treat people as people, treat them individually, treat them kindly and generously and long-term and encourage them to live out of less fear. I think that's the major thing. If you look at most organizations, they run on fear. Fear of what do my peers think of me, fear that I might not be enough, fear of whether I get that promotion or we may lose that customer.
That's that dirty fuel that, look, it can operate. It's very high octane. It can operate the vehicle for a while, but ultimately it's going to bonk out. We've seen that over and over and over again. The really difficult situations in these companies are all the result of messy people.
Cameron Howe
Very interesting. Do you have any books that you read that really helped you along that leadership journey and just changing your thinking on how you approach businesses?
Brent Beshore
Yeah, there's a couple of books by a pair of authors, Steve Cochran and Jeremy Kubitschek. I would just encourage you to Google them. They have one called the "100X Leader." They've done a lot of work and I know them, they're friends of mine. They've done incredible work across the spectrum with businesses at different levels. Their main focus is on the emotional and cultural health of the organizations, and whether it's on the individual level in small teams or as a whole, they've been some of the most insightful people I've really read on this topic.
They've got, gosh, I don't know, seven, eight, 10 books out, and they've got an organization called Giant. They're probably best known for an overlay on top of Myers-Briggs called Five Voices, which is an incredibly powerful framework, much more easy to understand and straightforward and sort of actionable than Myers-Briggs. I would say they're the group that I would look to learn from.
Cameron Howe
Okay. Very interesting. I'm gonna probably buy that on Amazon right after this.
So, Brent, as a concluding thought here, I've had quite a few friends all brought up the great wealth transfer. A lot of older individuals retiring, selling their businesses, and a lot of these folks looking to buy a small business. Do you have any advice and also ways that they can go about evaluating these companies if this is an area and where to find those companies?
Brent Beshore
Yeah, I actually wrote a piece a couple of years back. It's on the Permanent Equity website. I think if you just Google it, it should pop up called "How to Buy Your First Smaller Business." I get so many people reaching out to me with a lot of these same questions, right? Maybe I'm an executive at a larger company, I'm thinking about leaving, thinking about buying my own business. Where do I start? How do I find these businesses? What should I be thinking about? How do I evaluate them?
There's obviously an incredible amount of nuance to this, right? What I would say is there's thankfully a lot more people who've written about it on the internet. I would be careful to really scrutinize and look at the people who are giving the advice. There's a lot of people out there who are selling courses
who have never done it well themselves. In fact, there are exceptions to this. So I'm not saying as a rule, but for the most part, if you're really successful at buying and operating small companies, you're probably not going to stop doing that and instead focus your time on selling courses, just as a broad theory.
So there is thankfully a lot of information, a lot of people writing good things out there. My first advice to them would be to really understand what their constraints are. If you're going to go buy a smaller company, do you want to live in the same geography, or can you move? That one right there solves a lot. If you're from Toronto and you want to live in Toronto, you should probably buy a business in Toronto, right? These businesses are not mailbox money-type investments. These are not things that are passive. You're going to need to be active in it.
The geography matters a lot, your ability to get there and get there quickly matters a lot. So probably buying within your geography is important. If you're going to decide to buy a business in Toronto, then you probably need to figure out, "Okay, well, how do I find the type of business that I have an expertise in?" If you came out of an aerospace background, you could certainly buy something outside of that, but you've got this really valuable expertise that would be valuable in that area. So what are the smaller companies that are in aerospace that can utilize your talents?
All investing, the way you should think about it, is the assumption of risk. There is no investing without the assumption of risk. What you're trying to do is be properly compensated for the risk you're taking. Hopefully, there's something about you, and that's what I love about the smaller private markets, is there's something about you that can mitigate that risk. So if you came out of the aerospace business and you find an aerospace business, then you say, "Hey, I actually know what's going on here at a much deeper level than just somebody who came in off the street who had no idea." That means that if your head of engineering leaves, you might be able to fill in the gaps so you can mitigate a risk that somebody else couldn't mitigate.
So I would just be really thoughtful about what is the talent you're bringing to the table. Then secondarily, how are you going to finance it, and what is the range of companies that you can access financing? There's just no free lunch. If you want to buy a larger company and need to bring on investors, those investors are people too, and they're messy, and they come with demands and they come with time horizons. You need to be really clear on aligning the interests between you and your investors and the organization.
If you want to forego outside investors and let's say you've saved up, I don't know in Canada what the ability is to get debt on these smaller companies, but maybe you want to take a risk and get some debt on it as well. That's a risk you're taking. There's no free lunch. Any which way you look, it's just going to be about assumption of risk and what's the reward on the other side. How are you going to mitigate those risks? How are you going to pursue the businesses in either your geography or in your industry or whatever it might be? These are fairly straightforward things. I go into a lot more detail in the piece and just again, encourage you to Google or look on the Permanent Equity website, just permanentequity.com, and under the content section, I don't know, it's a pretty big content section.
Cameron Howe
And so with, I know you run a couple of conferences as well. Is this a good place for people to go and scan for small businesses?
Brent Beshore
Yeah. So we run two events a year. One's called Capital Camp, which is for professional investors. So LPs and GPs come together and we're trying to, it's the unconference. It's trying to have a great time, amazing food and drinks. It's actually in Columbia, Missouri. Both these are every year. We've been doing that one for five years, and it's been a joy. So excited about that.
The second one is called Main Street Summit, just mainstreetsummit.com. That is in Columbia, Missouri as well in the fall. That's really for owners, operators, and investors in small to medium-sized businesses. That one's a little bit larger. It's about a thousand, a little over a thousand people this last year. It's a festival. It's kind of like South by Southwest, but for people who are, again, investors, owners, operators of small to medium-sized businesses. So yeah, if anybody is out there and thinks that's interesting, we have people from all over the world come in for both of them. We'd encourage you to reach out.
Cameron Howe
Very interesting. Yeah, we'll leave a link to the show notes for both that blog article and then also for those conferences as well. Brent, thank you so much for coming on today. It was very fascinating. You've given me a lot of takeaways, a couple of books to go and buy as well. I really appreciate your time. I think it's very fascinating what you've been building with Permanent Equity, and we're gonna keep a close eye on it as well at Investipal.
Brent Beshore
Hey, thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Take care.
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