How We Bought 160 Businesses and Built a $1.5B HoldCo at 33 and 35 | Ramsey Sahyoun of Evergreen

Ramsey Sahyoun shares how Evergreen grew from a Berkshire-inspired idea into a $1.5B revenue, $250M EBITDA HoldCo with 160 acquisitions.

We discuss proprietary sourcing, decentralization, talent, value creation, MSPs, and the lessons behind building one of America’s most interesting acquisition machines.

Timestamps:
0:00 Evergreen’s scale and long-term hold model
2:06 Discovering private equity and buying private companies
4:14 Meeting Jeff Totten at Alpine Investors
5:53 Evergreen’s first acquisition and current portfolio
8:14 How Berkshire Hathaway inspired Evergreen
10:23 Leaving Alpine and starting young
12:18 The first 6-18 months after closing
13:15 What went wrong with an early MSP roll-up
15:25 Why centralization hurt customer intimacy
18:44 Building Evergreen’s sourcing engine
22:27 Why Ramsey still talks to business owners himself
23:07 The value of having a large acquisition database
26:09 How to build trust with business owners
29:18 Why finding great deals is still the most important part of M&A
32:09 Higher valuations, higher rates, and value creation
34:02 Evergreen’s M&A, talent, and playbook flywheel
37:43 Why talent drives investing outcomes
39:17 Motivating founders vs. hired CEOs
41:54 Lessons from 160 acquisition post-mortems
44:22 Setting big goals and planning backward
47:16 Evergreen’s one-page plan and quarterly renewals
48:53 What Evergreen learned from Alpine and Graham Weaver
51:27 How Ramsey and Jeff’s roles changed as Evergreen scaled
54:21 What people misunderstand about Evergreen
55:07 How Ramsey’s view on managing people changed
56:48 Closing thoughts from Ramsey

This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.