We invest in quality businesses with teams who want to keep building.
Red Iron Group partners with teams to build market leaders. We help companies achieve growth and scale by focusing on technology adoption, differentiated products and services, outstanding talent and deep customer relationships.
About
Who we are
Our focus
We invest in durable small and medium-size businesses with demonstrated growth and predictable revenue. We focus on the quality of the business, the commitment of the team to building scale, and the duration of the end-market opportunity being served. We seek to use technology in unique new ways to enhance the customer experience and enhance competitive advantage in all our investments.
Types of investment
We invest in privately held businesses (family-owned, founder-run, or institutional), divisions or subsidiaries of large companies and public companies considering an ownership transition. We can offer significant flexibility structuring an investment that meets the needs of owners and operators. For example, we will provide liquidity to existing investors, fund acquisition strategies or work to structure an investment creatively that meets the needs of owners. We will acquire the entire business up front or work with the shareholders to provide initial liquidity with a longer-term path to more liquidity as the business value increases over time.
Our background
Our team has decades of experience advising, investing in and scaling small and medium-size businesses. Our principals have invested in over 100 companies, including majority acquisitions and minority equity investments. We concentrate our resources on a small group of investments at any one time, allowing us to commit significant time and resources to the teams with whom we partner.
Our capital
Our capital is long-term and patient. We seek to partner with businesses that can grow for many years where we can provide stable, dependable support over time. Our principals are the largest investors in everything we do. In addition, our capital base is composed of investors aligned with our investment strategy, many of whom have built businesses themselves. We and our partners believe that while capital itself can sometimes feel like a commodity, the commitment, support and aligned interests behind it should not.
About
Our priorities
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Partner
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Build
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Improve
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Invest
Partner
Iron sharpens iron.
We believe when a team with a high bar for excellence partners with an investment firm with a similarly high bar, both are made better and outstanding results follow. We back teams committed to building and growing their business who value what we bring to the table as a long-term partner. We believe success requires that we are well-aligned with the team in how we view the path to building an exceptional business.
Build
Keep building.
We work with teams to aggressively grow their businesses. This can take many forms, including investing in technology, expanding product and service portfolios, extending geographic reach, deepening customer relationships, and acquisitions. Our goal is to help every business scale to a multiple of its prior size over the course of our investment.
Improve
Make a good business better.
We believe even well-run businesses can find ways to improve. We work with companies to implement growth initiatives, invest in technologies to enhance the customer’s experience, increase revenue predictability, incentivize and develop exceptional talent and improve operations. These types of initiatives increase the value of a business significantly over time.
Invest
Investment can be a source of competitive advantage.
Great companies are never done investing in their products and services, people and customer relationships. As a long-term partner committed to supporting organic growth and acquisition opportunities, we are a source of strategic advantage to small and medium-size businesses. Our partnership and capital base enables leadership teams to be proactive, as well as opportunistic, when internal and external opportunities for investment arise. Every dollar of available capital represents a potential opportunity to invest in building a better and faster growing business.
Our values guide us
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Integrity. Our word is our bond. We place great value in trust, which is grounded in honesty and direct communication.
- Grit. Success requires perseverance, resilience, courage and a commitment to long-term goals.
- Partnership. The cornerstone of our approach is to partner with founders and management teams and work to help them build truly exceptional businesses.
- Hard work. Building a great business is hard work and that is something we welcome and embrace.
- Passion. We move with conviction, energy, and purpose in whatever we do.
“Continuous effort—not strength or intelligence—is the key to unlocking our potential.”
Winston Churchill
Approach
How we work with companies
Our methods have been applied and proven over decades with businesses serving
end-markets across the economy. We work with teams using tried and true approaches to business growth and improvement, with a focus on four core sets of activities.
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Technology enablement and transformation
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Revenue growth and predictability
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Acquisitions
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Operational improvement
Technology enablement and transformation
Our team has a Silicon Valley heritage, with decades of technology industry experience.
Technology can be a source of competitive advantage for small and medium-size businesses, especially as they scale. We work with companies on the strategic deployment of technology. We use technology to improve the customer experience and customer engagement, enhance sales productivity and, through integration with data science, improve pricing and marketing. Tactical implementations of technology can also drive business value—improving financial systems, managing enterprise-wide applications, rationalizing core technology infrastructure, or improving employee communications.
Revenue growth and predictability
Customer relationships are the source of long-term value.
We are experts in helping build recurring and predictable revenue relationships with customers. We have expertise identifying the key metrics that should be tracked, managed and optimized in businesses with recurring or highly predictable revenue. We work with teams to identify opportunities to change pricing models, service delivery, customer experience, cost to serve or product/service portfolios in order to optimize the value of the customer relationship. Our work sometimes involves incremental and gradual change, other times the change is transformative, but in all cases the goal is to make the business more valuable over time.
Acquisitions
Strategic thinking and resulting actions should be deliberate.
Our team has spent the past 30 years working with teams to develop and implement value-building consolidation strategies utilizing acquisitions. When done right, and when supported by a well-aligned equity partner, a consolidation strategy can drive product portfolio enhancement, geographic reach, broader customer relationships and fresh sources of competitive advantage. Using acquisitions to thoughtfully scale a business builds durable value.
Operational improvement
Improving business quality as a continuous process.
Our team is built to assist with a wide range of initiatives that drive improvements in core operational performance and enhance the foundation for scaling revenue and market presence. We have experience working with companies as they grow from tens of millions in revenue to many hundreds of millions. We find, along the way, there is value in proactively seeking out and acting upon opportunities to fine-tune and improve operations.
Investment criteria
What we look for in a business
Financial profile
Revenue $10-250MM.
Profitable or a clear path to profitability.
Predictable revenue.
Growth
History of organic growth.
Potential to consolidate and expand its addressable market organically and through acquisitions.
Management
Deep industry knowledge.
Committed to scaling their business.
Industry
Sectors where investments in technology can increase the competitive advantage of a business.
Secular growth.
Sectors across the economy with durable end-market opportunities.