1 hour 45 minute listen
Portsmouth, NH
On our latest episode of the Positive Enterprise Value Podcast my guest is Chet Jordan. Chet is one of the co-founders and co-owners of Digital Architecture, a business that he and his partner Ken Blais began. Their mission was to digitize and make easy to use college and university course catalogs. They've expanded into way more than that, but that was the initial opportunity for them. And they began to digitize course catalogs so the students and professors in the universities and colleges they work with would be able to access the course catalogs quickly, be able to see what was available, what wasn't. If you've been a student in higher education, you know that getting a course into your curriculum having to do with your major is often a challenging undertaking, and they digitized that and made it infinitely easier.
Bigelow architected a recapitalization of digital architecture by Serent Capital five years ago, and Chet shares with us today the really interesting and useful observations he has being a board member of the business after it was private equity-owned. And then, actually having gone through a second transaction with Serent, where they just did a recap of the business themselves. So, Chet is an expert entrepreneur of being able to think through what his alternatives were, both strategic and private equity. And then being feet on the street by actually working with a private equity firm, bringing in a new CEO, transitioning his and Ken's role and watching how that all works. And for those of you who are Entrepreneur Owner-Managers, thinking about a private equity transition someday, this is just invaluable, invaluable advice. I hope you enjoy it.
Listen to the interview here:
What I am Reading / Listening to
Oh William! (2021)
By Elizabeth Strout
Oh William! is evidently the third in a series by Elizabeth Strout which, (don’t know why I didn’t know this) I didn’t know until after I read it and was looking through her work to see what I missed! I really enjoyed her prior books about Olive Kitteridge, and think she is a fine writer.
Evidently, her writing is so seamless that it didn’t matter that I did not read the first two in the series. Everyone who reads this story will empathize with parts of the narrative and some of the characters. It’s in the first person, much as if we are in Lucy Barton’s mind seeing what she’s seeing, thinking what she’s thinking, feeling what she’s feeling. Sounds complicated, but it really works. Strout’s creation of characters, like her depiction of Catherine Cole in vivid color compared to the shades of gray of Barton is incredibly clever, and sympathetic, though with an edge.
Lucy says, “This is the way of life: the many things we do not know until it’s too late.”
I think in our heads, all of us can see ourselves in Lucy’s thoughts and feelings.
Entrepreneur Owner-Manager Quote
“I’m a successful businessman and I consider myself to be on top of my game. I now shudder to say it, but can you believe I actually considered having no M&A Advisor at all? Thank goodness I found Bigelow because I simply had no idea of the complexity involved with making this happen successfully. Bigelow did an outstanding job; we could not have selected a better team.”
-Barry Hibble, Founder & former CEO of Micronics, Inc.
