In this episode, we talk with Brad Morehead, Partner and Head of the Business Services Fund at Shore Capital Partners, who has also been a CEO, a CFO, a business professor, and a founder who built and sold his own company. We talk about business models: why the way a company acquires and keeps customers tells you more about how to build it than the industry it sits in, and what that means when you can group companies across a portfolio of nearly 70 by model rather than by end market. Brad walks through how models evolve, from founder-led selling to professionalized sales and from break/fix work to recurring revenue, and how a future-state org chart, the right board member, and a new set of KPIs carry a company through that shift. He also shares the lesson from a mentor that he now teaches younger investors: when someone tells you an idea didn’t work, ask why, because you cannot be wrong when you are asking a question. We close with his own experience being acquired by a buyer in the exact same industry with a completely different model, which he compares to trying to build something with Legos and an Erector Set.

• Group companies by business model, not by industry, because a pest control business and a veterinary practice that both sell direct to consumers have more to teach each other than two companies that merely share an end market
• Draw the future-state org chart before you change the model, then design the transition structure, systems, and KPIs (attach rate, cross-sell, recurring revenue) that get you there
• Ask why when a founder says “we tried that and it didn’t work,” because the question gets you to the root cause, validates the person in front of you, and cannot be wrong
• Recognize the watch-outs that come with a model alongside its upside, because negative working capital or a subsidized customer acquisition model can let a company grow itself out of cash

In this episode, Jamie Cusack, CEO of Keystone Access Partners, Shore Capital’s entrance and access control platform built on Dillard Companies and The Ritchie Group, shares how he came to the CEO seat by watching the Shore model work from the inside as a board member of another Shore company before betting his own career on it. He walks through what a growth-based partnership looks like from the founder’s side of the table: the open conversation about what each owner wants next, the leadership training his teams had never had access to before, and the promise that a process that works in the field is something to learn from rather than replace. Jamie also takes on the biggest assumption he hears in the market, that owners running on spreadsheets or pen and paper aren’t ready to sell, and explains why most are more ready than they think. Finally, he is direct about what Keystone looks for in a partner and why a good business isn’t enough: the people have to be good too.

In this episode, I talk with Owen Miller, CEO of 360Pack, a food and beverage packaging distribution business headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Owen joined 360Pack in its first year of operations through the Shore Capital CXO Fellows Program and, in less than five years, moved from CXO to VP of Supply Chain and Operations to COO and now to the CEO seat. He shares what it took to grow into each of those roles, including learning alongside founders with decades of industry experience and what the CEO seat has taught him that he couldn’t have learned anywhere else. Owen also explains why the ambiguity of the CXO role is exactly the point: it demands intellectual curiosity, humility, and a willingness to run toward the messiest parts of the business while building influence without formal authority. Finally, he offers some straight talk for anyone considering the program: if you’re looking for a cushy, kick-your-feet-up kind of role, this is not for you; if you’re looking to be pushed and to grow like never before, there is no better place to be.

In this episode, Josh Allen, founder of Companion Baking in St. Louis, Missouri, shares how he turned a love of baking discovered in the Bay Area into a frozen artisan bread manufacturer shipping custom products across all 48 contiguous states. Guided by his grandfather’s advice to listen to his customers, Josh built the business one customer and one product at a time, pivoted from wholesale to frozen manufacturing, and made helping customers tell their stories through bread the heart of what Companion does. He also reflects on why he always took the private equity calls out of curiosity, what made Shore different, and why partnering now rather than later lets him stay part of the journey as Companion builds its platform.

In this episode, I talk with Nick Sherrard, Chief of Staff at Thermal Shipping Solutions and a member of the CXO Fellows Program. Nick shares how an internship at a Shore portfolio company showed him just how quickly he could make a measurable difference in a microcap business, and what it means to be Chief of Staff in a fast-growing, family-founded company. An engineer by training, he reflects on thinking in inputs, outputs, and bottlenecks, finding the root causes behind recurring fire drills, and driving change without authority by making every solution a win-win-win. Nick also describes the role of the CXO cohort, part joint therapy and part best-practice sharing, and shares the best advice he’s ever gotten: don’t confuse urgency with importance.

In this episode, Keith Caldwell, CEO of H2O Care Partners, and Sarah Longstreet, the company’s Chief Marketing Officer, share the story of building a national water treatment platform. It began in 2021 when Keith met Mark St. Hilaire, founder of H2O Care in Massachusetts, and saw an opportunity to combine doing good with the growth potential of a fragmented, family-run industry. Today the platform spans more than thirty brands across nearly twenty states, supported by a Boston-based resource team of over forty across marketing, finance, hiring, technology, and operations. Keith and Sarah reflect on the network effect that emerges when great local businesses come together, how each new partner brings superpowers that get shared across the platform, and why preserving local brands, community ties, and long-tenured teams is central to how they scale. They also discuss what makes the right partner, from founders approaching retirement to those just getting started, and what’s next as the platform continues to grow.