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What does it take to build a diversified holding company that thrives across multiple industries? In this episode of The Business Owner’s Journey, host Nick Berry sits down with Chase Murdock, CEO of Decada Group. Chase shares his entrepreneurial journey, from launching a luxury clothing business to acquiring and scaling companies in construction, electrical contracting, and fine arts.
He breaks down the strategy behind Decada Group’s success, including how they make three crucial bets on every investment; the industry, the business, and the leadership. He also reveals the biggest challenge in acquisition entrepreneurship: identifying and retaining top-tier operators. Plus, Chase discusses Durable, his newest venture focused on building a community for small business owners and providing fractional CFO and CMO services.
If you’ve ever thought about starting or growing a holding company, this episode is packed with insights on long-term ownership, the importance of autonomy, and how to build a team that sticks.
Chase shares the analogy of a racetrack to explain his investment philosophy. Every acquisition Decada Group makes is based on three fundamental bets: the industry (racetrack), the business itself (horse), and the leadership team (jockey). Chase explains why each element is critical to success and how neglecting one can tank an otherwise promising investment.
Chase didn’t start Decada Group with a master plan, it evolved through hands-on experience. He shares how Decada transitioned from a company focused on rapid growth to one centered on long-term, sustainable ownership. Their strategy has shifted toward acquiring stable, durable businesses where operators can thrive, rather than just chasing growth at all costs.
Finding the right person to lead a company post-acquisition is one of the hardest parts of running a holding company. Chase explains how great operators don’t always self-identify and why hiring slowly and firing quickly is key to maintaining a strong leadership culture.
With Durable, Chase is building a peer network and support system for business owners. He believes small business ownership is undervalued, and his goal is to create a platform that helps entrepreneurs grow through community, education, and fractional executive services.
🗣 "We want to be the first call when a seller in Salt Lake City decides to exit. That’s the reputation we’re building."
🗣 "An exceptional CEO is worth their crazy comp package. They create value that no one else can."
🗣 "Holding companies need a vision. If you’re just accumulating businesses with no strategy, you’ll burn out fast."
🗣 "The best entrepreneurs aren’t always the best operators. Running a small business takes a different skill set than launching one."
🗣 "Our goal is to hold businesses forever, not flip them for a quick return. That’s what makes us different."
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The Business Owner's Journey Podcast host: Nick Berry
Production Company: FCG
00:00 The Entrepreneurial Journey Begins
03:28 Building Decada Group: The Early Years
06:29 Navigating Challenges and Opportunities
09:29 Acquisition Strategy: Expanding Horizons
12:10 The Importance of Industry and Leadership
15:00 Evolving Strategies: From Growth to Stability
17:38 The Three Bets: Racetrack, Horse, and Jockey
20:14 Diversifying the Portfolio: New Acquisitions
22:56 Creating a Sustainable Business Structure
25:44 Building a Visionary Holding Company
28:59 The Importance of Autonomy in Operations
32:56 Attracting and Retaining Top Talent
36:44 The Challenge of Identifying Operators
39:22 Introducing Durable: A New Venture
44:34 Creating Community for Small Business Owners
50:16 The Value of Small Businesses in Communities
Nick Berry (00:12)
Chase Murdock is a Salt Lake City based entrepreneur and the CEO of Decada Group, which is his holding company that acquires, grows and stewards eclectic and diverse small businesses in Salt Lake City. And we had a fascinating conversation.
We talked about Chase's strategy for building a visionary holding company how they're making three bets with each investment on the industry, the business and the leadership. how they want to become the first call that a seller in Salt Lake City makes.
why he thinks that an exceptional CEO is worth their crazy comp packages that you hear about them earning. He shared that their new acquisitions have grown by 65 % in the first year. The biggest challenge and how they're addressing identifying operators for their acquisitions and how now they've evolved and expanded their portfolio to...
include creation of communities for small business owners, why they're doing that and why it's so important.
Chase is sharp. Their strategy is brilliant. This is one of the most interesting and enlightening interviews that I've had with my podcast guest. I think you're going to really enjoy it. Chase Murdock.
Nick Berry (01:23)
a lot of entrepreneurs, I might even say most entrepreneurs at some point have had this flash, this moment where they're like, that's what I want to do. I want to have all the companies. I want to have a bunch.
Chase Murdock (01:32)
You're in my
own kingdom. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Nick Berry (01:35)
Right. Cause they're probably
having a good day or they're in a hot streak. Something's going really well. And they're like, I could just do this forever. I should have a bunch of this going on. And the reality is different. Right. But what you're doing is, I mean, it looks really good. Like it's run really well. yeah, it should be appreciated. It's not an accident. let's. Yeah.
Chase Murdock (01:44)
the reality is different. Yeah.
Well, I'll share the good and the bad fully transparently.
So yeah, we'll get into it. Straight off, like, yeah, it's my dream career. I want to do this the next 30 years of my life. You know, I could die doing what I'm doing today. However, there are a lot of things that would cause a lot of people to not want to do this and it's hard and there's challenges and so happy to share.
Nick Berry (01:57)
the reality, right?
Chase Murdock (02:11)
So, Decada is kind of a, let's see, we're nine years into the company that ultimately made Decada Group. There's kind of this joke, at least here in Utah, that a lot of our big tech startups are 10-year overnight success stories where you don't hear about the first nine years, you hear about like the year where they finally raise capital and finally get acquired or finally IPO. And it feels like this, this like quick journey.
ours is similar in that the beginning of our journey, the first six years, we're just building slowly a small kind of, wouldn't say boring because the industry is really interesting, but a non-glamorous, low TAM never unicorn status possible small business here in salt Lake. So Adam and I started nine years ago, Tailor cooperative and Tailor cooperative is a luxury custom Clothier.
which is a fancy way of saying we make custom suits, custom shirts, custom boots and shoes, denim. It's it's a collier in downtown Salt Lake City. And we started it because we kind of wanted to own a small side business, a lifestyle business that was one fun to own. was in a great industry, a great product. I had some connections on the manufacturing side. Adam, my best friend and longtime business partner, he
He kind of comes from a marketing and growth background and we wanted to create a better luxury suit shop in Salt Lake. And nine years ago, mean, Salt Lake is still a small city. Nine years ago, it was even smaller. And the idea of a luxury kind of New York style loft, a suit shop was pretty foreign and we wanted to go create that. And the vision at the time was we wanted, we wanted a beautiful business. We wanted, we wanted something great. We wanted something we could be proud of.
but we knew we weren't going to go hit a home run off this company. The goal wasn't to sell it. Obviously, no custom collier is ever going to IPO. The goal instead was we had this insight where maybe we could keep it small intentionally, optimize it for cash flow, and leverage that cash flow to go and pursue moonshot ventures that would be our main thing.
So the idea is Tailor Cooperative wasn't supposed to be the main thing. It was supposed to be the sideshow. And it was supposed to, if done well, we would siphon off a little bit of cashflow. We would have a general manager running it day to day. And we would, even if we were distributing 10,000 a month to me and Adam, that would give us a runway to go build the next big thing. Because the first 10, 15 years of my career were pursuing moonshop ventures, tech, B2B SaaS companies, venture backed, I ran a venture backed retail company.
And the funny thing about being in venture is like even though you go raise a boatload of money, you're always fundraising, always, always, always, always. And the longer you can go not raising capital, the less diluted you'll get. And I at the time was, you know, seeing stories in TechCrunch, Mashable, all these stories of founders who ended up by the time they exited their tech startup that was hyper highly successful.
They were diluted down to single digit percentages and still great outcomes. It's still amazing, but I didn't want that. I wanted, I wanted to be able to go build a product, find product market fit. And then once we had that go raise capital and the, little, you know, a little idea at the time that was naive and we were dead wrong about was maybe Tailor cooperative could allow us to do that. And then fast forward a year and a half later, we were doing a million bucks a year top line. was profitable and building something small that wasn't scalable, that was profitable.
Nick Berry (05:29)
Mm-hmm.
Chase Murdock (05:46)
was a hell of a lot more fun than anything I'd done previously in my career. And we fell in love with small business at that point.
Nick Berry (05:49)
Yeah.
Yeah. But so you had, so you weren't thinking holding company at the time. It was more like this thing is going to feed cash and we're going to go big with that cash. some of the principles are there.
Chase Murdock (06:01)
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I don't
think we said holding company until we actually had acquired our second company and had a holding company. You know, like this wasn't some grand vision. We whiteboarded out on like, you know, return on capital and the silver tsunami of baby boomers retiring. And like we weren't, we weren't plugged into any of that. the, the, way the story actually progresses is so we found a Tailor Cooperative in 2016, four years later, was late 2019, early 2020.
Nick Berry (06:09)
Yeah.
Chase Murdock (06:29)
And we had packed away some capital and we were about to go expand and open a second location because we had a great flagship location. was run largely independently of our time, profitable every single month. was, you know, we had a sustainable and repeatable way to acquire customers. We're doing a lot of digital marketing. Repeat customers were great. Organic was growing. Our average sale price was going up every single year. Our gross profit was going up every single year. We were seeing like
mid 70s to mid 80s net promoter scores. So we had evangelist customers and we were like, Hey, we've got a guy thing going. This is, this is great. Let's go open a second location. And we had done a lot of research in tier two cities that were within a two or three hour flight from Salt Lake city. So we were looking at, you know, maybe not LA and San Francisco, but we're looking at Seattle and Denver and Phoenix. And I think Dallas was in the mix.
Nick Berry (07:02)
Yeah.
Chase Murdock (07:21)
And we had identified Phoenix as a great market. It was similar culturally to Salt Lake City, but they had fewer custom clothe airs per 100,000 people, but higher search volume and interest in suits. So we kind of had this like, okay, this looks like a good market. We started traveling down there. We retained a real estate agent and we started looking for space. And we found this beautiful, way too expensive retail.
space in Old Town Scottsdale that was like way outside our budget. you know, as always happens, we fell in love with it. It looked like the perfect spot. We were convincing ourselves that this was the right next move for us. And then the NBA shuts down due to COVID and then the rest of the world shuts down. And so here we were in 2020 with like pent up energy, ready to go get after our next big move, some capital. And we had this weird kind of opportunity manifest, which was
a fine art school in South Salt Lake City came up for sale along with the real estate. And that was the first time we were like, huh, while we're waiting on the economy to rebound and the world to come back online and who knows what's going to happen with suits. I wonder if it would be worthwhile to try our hand and test our playbook in a different industry.
And this was a very different industry, fine art. mean, similar in the sense that like luxury suiting, fine art, you know, there's kind of a dotted line there. But as we lifted the hood, the business was priced really right because of COVID. The sellers had other thriving businesses. This was kind of an afterthought. It needed a new owner to come in and breathe fresh life into it. And as we lifted the hood, it actually was a pretty similar business from a business strategy standpoint.
you needed really high net promoter scores. You needed a sustainable and repeatable way to acquire customers, primarily online. You needed a really strong conversion funnel of how you get traffic to the website, how you get the website to convert it to a customer, how you get customers to show up into the physical real estate. And you needed a magical customer experience. And it was very different. And I think we were kind of just ready to try our next thing. And so we acquired what today is known as Workshop SLC.
and what is our second operating company. And the way we underwrote it was so amateur. We were like, well, if the business fails, we like the real estate. And that was like effectively our thesis. If I were to like type up our one page, like investment memo, it'd be like, well, I think the business will work. And if it doesn't, no problem. We've got the real estate. And we acquired that company in 2021. And four or five exited in the first year, four or five exited again in the second year.
lost a lot of hair on my head and it was very stressful and the J curve was very deep and we lost money in the first year, but we were driving really cool revenue growth and finally we came out of that J curve and it's today our most profitable company on an EBITDA percent of revenue basis. And it's an art school. We teach 200 art classes every month from ceramics to acrylics to oils to drawing. We're partnered with a lot of local schools and universities and corporates
corporations who do private events with us. And it needed energy and it needed capital and it needed a leader who we plugged in and all of those things got put in place and slowly the business started catalyzing into its second chapter. And that's when we realized like, okay, this is interesting. What if we continue to look at diversifying, but not for the sake of diversifying, let's look for businesses where our playbook
can be best utilized, where we can be really good owners, where there's a business that has something of value, like product market fit, they've latched onto something, it's been around several years, but we feel like we can come in and bring a special sauce to the equation. And that was our thesis at the time, is let's go acquire companies where we can go pull some levers and do some really cool things and go catalyze growth.
And we've since evolved our strategies as we've kind of acquired companies. And today our strategy is slightly different. And I'm sure we'll talk about that. But the very good thing is that
Nick Berry (11:18)
But you were starting to see the pattern.
You were starting to see the pattern at that point that you wanted to go what you were looking for.
Chase Murdock (11:24)
Yeah, I think we were. And I think that pattern was there's a lot of small businesses out there where there's value to go unlock, either because the previous owner was a craftsperson focused on their craft, whether plumbing or electrical or fine art or suiting. And we could bring in some expertise around business strategy, how the organizations run.
the financials, growth, sales and marketing, and we could help kind of pull some leverage to unlock it and help it get into the next chapter. And we were starting to see a lot of deal flow at that point, because we're in a small market, Salt Lake City, and once you start to acquire a couple of businesses, pretty quickly you get to know all the intermediaries, the brokers, the bankers, the attorneys, the professional advisors. And suddenly we started seeing some deal flow. And it wasn't all good. We were seeing a lot of kind of
quirky deals that you have to squint to see profit. But we started to see some interesting deals too. And that's when we realized maybe our greater opportunity is in the acquisition side and becoming really good stewards of companies that have retiring owners that care about whose hands the business gets placed in. And maybe our job to be done is to get really good at acquiring great companies, sourcing really great leaders.
and being a really good, supportive, kind of hands-on advisory board to that leadership to help the company get ushered into its next chapter. And all the while, we didn't raise any outside capital. We don't have a fund. We don't have to deploy capital on a certain time basis. We don't look at our return on invested capital metric. We're not focused on IRR. We funded our second company with the cash flow of our first.
We acquired our third company with a cashflow of one and two, and we've been acquiring companies off of our balance sheet ever since. We'll use debt, but we don't have outside investors. And so it kind of allows us to march to the beat of our own drum and move at the pace that makes sense for us. And most importantly, we're not forced to go put short-term artificial pressure on our company's post-acquisition to go get to some three to five-year exit. Our goal is to never exit a company.
Nick Berry (13:26)
Mm-hmm.
Chase Murdock (13:27)
If we like the business and if we're good at running the business, even if we can go get a 8x multiple on it, if I can go run it for nine years, I beat that 8x multiple. so like why we've built a structure where we can hold and kind of run these companies and to us that's invaluable and we want to hold these companies forever. And that means we want to be really kind of long-sighted, long-term owners of companies.
Nick Berry (13:52)
Yeah. So now I can see having just read your race track, race horse and jockey posts this morning. So now I can see this, your thought process coming together and how that analogy, like it applies perfectly.
Chase Murdock (13:57)
Mm.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah,
I wrote a post on local legends. been months, so it's a little dusty, but I kind of brought forward a framework that I heard a lot coming from venture capital of when you do a deal, you're making three bets simultaneously. The first bet is on the racetrack, and the analogy is a horse track. So you have the racetrack, you have the horse, and you have the jockey. The three bets you place in one is the racetrack, which in my space is the industry.
What industry are we acquiring in? Are there tailwinds? Is this good industry to be in? The horse, that's the business. Is this a good business? Does it have a good culture? Has it had good leadership? Has it been run well? Of all the companies in a market, is this a good company or a bad company? And then the third is the jockey, and that's the management team or the operator.
In venture, when an angel investor, a venture capital firm strokes a check and invests in a company, they're making those three bets. saying, this is a growth market. We like the market. We like the space. We like the company. This feels like the right product. This feels like the right company to get behind. And then third, this feels like the right founding team. We're going to get behind the founder. For us, it's slightly different. When we acquire a company, we're assessing, do we like the industry that we're about to go commit ourselves to for a very long time? Do we feel like it good tailwinds? Do we like the profile of the industry?
Second, do we like the company? this a good business? Do we want to usher it into its second chapter? Is this a brand that we want in our portfolio? And then thirdly, either by promoting from within, because usually the owner leaves when they retire, by promoting from within or sourcing externally, do we have the right leadership in place? Who cares just as much about this company as we do and perhaps just as much as the founder did and who's really excited about bringing the company forward? And so you have the racetrack, the horse and the jockey.
And yeah, I think it's important to when diligence is a good deal, strip out those three elements and look at them individually. Because sometimes you might overlook something if you're just thinking about it as a deal holistically.
Nick Berry (16:10)
Yeah. So it's, um, from my experience and I, you know, I've built a holding company and then like finally exited out entirely of that, but that was a, a almost 15 year process. And I think one of the things now looking back is I was very, very, very focused on the jockey.
Chase Murdock (16:22)
Yeah.
it. Yep.
Nick Berry (16:28)
Yeah. It was always about the operator. didn't
start to require anything with the intention of being the operator. And I think that is one of the biggest challenges, but I think to your analogy, it doesn't mean you need to disregard the other two elements, got to, still attract and horse.
Chase Murdock (16:48)
So, yeah, you can have the best operator
in the world, the best management team in the world and set them up for misery and failure if you ask them to go run a bad company in a bad industry. so like a common question would maybe be like, okay, of the three, which matters the most? think it's hard to say, they all matter. I think you, but what's that like Charlie Munger or Buffett quote of like, you want to buy a business that any idiot could run because in the end like,
at some point an idiot is going to end up running it. like the point in that comment is like, go place a bet on the racetrack and the horse and make sure the jockey isn't the like million dollar variable. Because eventually you're going to have a bad jockey. And I get that. think a great operator is worth its weight in gold. I think one of my controversial beliefs is like all these crazy CEO comp packages that we read about in the New York Times.
I think they're worth every penny because I think an exceptional CEO can drive exceptional value where others can't. that's one of the biggest levers is a really great leader and management team. A really great leader recruits a great management team. A really great management team knows to work in the right areas. They pull the right levers in the business. And if you chart the course of a company, a really great operator and leadership team can take it on a course that's just remarkable, even if it's in all things being equal on the racetrack and the horse.
My stance isn't necessarily the racetrack and the horse don't matter, go focus on the jockey. That's definitely not my stance. I think one thing we've gained an appreciation for is how important the industry is. And we've ourselves into industries that, know, hindsight being 2020 and being a little sharper today, I don't know if we would have gotten into it. You know, I'm exaggerating a little bit there, but the industry you get into and which business you choose to acquire is absolutely critical. And so you've just got to get all three of those right. They don't all need to be 10 out of 10.
but you can't afford one of them to be less than five or six.
Nick Berry (18:39)
Yeah. think if you're, especially if you're trying to put together, if it's a piece of your strategy, like you're talking about, you're aiming for high performance. You're not just trying to have an asset. You're trying to have an asset that is producing. Like if they're going to have a spot on the roster, like they have to pull their weight, right?
Chase Murdock (18:58)
Yeah,
yeah. And I think we are shifting strategically or kind of maturing, maybe I should say, where we're moving away from acquiring small kind of sub five million revenue sub one million EBITDA companies where we're jumping in and trying to drive very meaningful growth like the average company that we so to date, we've made four acquisitions on average.
in the first year post-acquisition, a Decada company grows 65%, which is very uncommon and very hard to do. And you break a lot of things when you do that. And that's because we've been buying what I would maybe call value assets, know, smaller companies, but where there's really exciting potential and runway where we're going to come in with or without an operator and be very hands-on at the holding company level, helping unlock growth, helping, you know, eliminate barriers, invest in sales and marketing.
and go drive growth. We're slowly maturing our strategy at Decada where we're looking for more stable companies where that kind of growth isn't really necessary or doesn't need to happen that quickly. Where yes, we want to see a growth opportunity. We want to go get after something. We want to acquire a company where there's a lot of value to be unlocked. But we're also wanting to pay, if we have to, a price premium.
to go get a company that's stable, that's durable, that has repeatability, where maybe the goal isn't to go grow 65 % or even 10 % in year one. Instead, we want to kind of get into that slow compounding game where nothing major has to happen in the first few years. We couldn't afford to take that strategy early on because we were self-funded. We weren't out looking for $3 million EBITDA businesses that don't need to grow. We were out looking at businesses that frankly today
I probably wouldn't even put an LOI out on or request the teaser based on their financial profile. At the time, we were looking at deals we had to look at and we were doing what we had to do in order to go form what we were trying to create, which is to cut
Nick Berry (20:55)
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you kind of are evolving toward, I'll use the Yankees, the New York Yankees as like, they don't need to test the waters with unproven players. Like they can let everybody else try them out. And then once they're proven, we need more turnkey. We're looking for more stability.
Chase Murdock (21:12)
Our goal strategically is in 10 or 20 years and hopefully more and more every day on our journey toward that goal is we want a seller to go out of their way to sell to Decada Group because they are confident that we are the right long-term stewards and owners for us. And we don't have that reputation today yet. know, we're too small a market. We've only been at this four or five years. And yeah, and I think in order to do that, we've got to develop a track record. We have to be good stewards. We have to be...
Nick Berry (21:26)
Mm-hmm.
Chase Murdock (21:39)
present in the market. And so that's kind of our long-term strategic advantage that we're trying to go build.
Nick Berry (21:45)
Yeah. Yeah. You're not looking for like a full reclamation projects or lottery tickets. So, okay. So you've got custom tailored suits and then, and you've got an art school. so then tell me about the, the other two acquisitions so far. And it's like, I'm trying to put the picture together for somebody who's listening of
Chase Murdock (21:49)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Nick Berry (22:05)
like how broad is the scope here?
Chase Murdock (22:07)
Yeah,
so our next acquisition really broadens the scope. We go from custom suits to fine art to construction. Very unnatural progression. We acquired a general contractor and a custom home builder leader in Utah in the space of ADUs, which are accessory dwelling units. Sometimes people call them tiny homes. And we kind of had two theses at once.
in acquiring Built by Design. One was we, this company had gone from zero to a few million bucks a year by saying yes to every type of job. our thesis number one was we were going to help them focus in on a niche and double down on that niche and say no to everything except for one, two or three different things. And the second thesis and reason that we acquired Built by Design was we wanted to increase our proximity to the trades. We had two companies at the time.
that were luxury goods, potentially discretionary and potentially decent exposure to macro climate change. And we wanted to get into what I saw at the time is the very opposite of that, which is if your toilet clogs, you call a plumber. If your power goes out, you call an electrician. It doesn't matter if you're in a recession or in a bull market. Those are very durable trades.
And we wanted to, our thesis was in acquiring a general contractor that worked with 60 to 80 subcontractors at any given point in time, we would be able to evangelize our kind of Decata's mission of we're acquiring companies from retiring owners and gain proximity and access to the trades through that acquisition. And it proved out to be true. We closed on Built by Design and 90 days later,
we ended up acquiring their largest electrical contractor sub, Northern Electric. And so very quickly we grew our portfolio from two companies to four. One as a general contractor, luxury home builder, and then the next as a kind of standard electrician, an electrical contractor.
Nick Berry (24:00)
Okay. All right. And so where at this point has the light bulb come on? you like, this is what we're doing. Like we now, now we know it sounds like, but when you talk about it, sounds like you knew.
Chase Murdock (24:10)
Yeah, yeah. think
post workshop SLC growth, I think that was when it was, shoot, if we we focus in on this, and we hone our playbook, and we recruit great people, I could see us get it good at this. There were a couple of missing ingredients at the time that felt daunting, like, shoot, how do you get really great leadership to come and partner with you to run the company? You know, we were getting more and more distant from the day to day and more and more distant from the goings on of kind of
you know, an average Tuesday and how do you partner with great operators and kind of solve for that? And the second, we weren't experiencing issues with, but we felt like we were going to, which was split focus. How do you do this in an organized way? How do you do it in a way where we're not just like driving to every company every day, solving problems and putting fires out, right? And not pulling our hair out. And so how do we create some kind of like operating structure or some kind of like
We want it to create a structure where it's in an ideal world. We have a flywheel, which is the more deal flow we're getting, the easier it is to buy great companies. Once you buy great companies, the bigger your kind of pool to acquire great operating talent, the more operators you have, the more upward mobility you can give these operators. Like our vision at the time was we want to promote from within into the operator role. And maybe they're running one of our smaller companies.
And at some point we tap them to go run one of our larger companies. And maybe once they've done that for a few years, they could come work at the holding company level at Decada. And so we wanted to kind of build this system. Like what's the structure for how do we sustainably do what we want to go do with Decada, which at the time was we want to be the proud owner of a variety of great companies in Utah that are part of the community in Utah that
Nick Berry (25:45)
Mm-hmm.
Chase Murdock (25:57)
are creating wealth for our operators and team members that are moving up and to the right. They're growing companies and we want to be patient owners that are letting them be the best versions of themselves they can be and supporting them along the way. And we knew that that was the vision, but we knew that we had to go do a lot of work to go create the structure to make that actually feasible.
Nick Berry (26:18)
What I'm hearing you talk about is kind of that the difference in a holding company being treated more passively and a holding company with a strategy and a vision for the future and being built with intention and like an operating, right? So to compare what you're describing with my own experience, I remember distinctly kind of taking a look, had put together a few operating brands.
And, but, but it wasn't with the intention of building a holding company. And so it was kind of like, what is my, what is this business that I have here? What is it and how do I get good at it? And you are like a more sophisticated perspective.
Chase Murdock (26:52)
Yeah, yeah,
Yeah, well, a
lot of trial and error is what it And I think like, there's a lot of different ways to go about a multi-company portfolio. There's roll-ups where you pick a very specific industry and niche, like let's say dental clinics. And your job as a roll-up is to go and acquire as many dental clinics as you can and get very good at running a dental clinic, knowing how to staff it.
Nick Berry (26:59)
There is a lot.
Chase Murdock (27:25)
the technology and operations behind it, what the P &L should look like if you're running it well, and you become an expert at running dental clinics. And that focus is really, really powerful. And then you can go and acquire a variety of dental clinics, and whether you roll them up under one brand or keep them all separate, there's pros and cons to either approach, but that's a roll-up. There's accumulators, there's...
a lot of kind of gray area in between. What we are is we're a diversified holding company where there's not a lot of synergy in between our companies. The clientele of Tailor Cooperative don't know about Built by Design. Northern Electric customers don't know about Workshop SLC. There's no like cross-selling. We don't share staff across the brands. They're run independently and our goal is for them to run independently. We sometimes say we want them to be good without Decada Group, but great with Decada Group. So we want their P &L to be...
fully profitable, fully staffed, fully autonomous without Decada Group. And we want to act as that kind of longer term steward of the vision where the operator's job is to make sure the day to day, the week to week, the month to month, the performance of the company is strong. Our job is to make sure the 10, 20 year vision gets protected and that the things we're doing year to year keep it on track with that multi-decade vision. And so we started Decada Group with a lot of
shared services and a lot of like overlap between the companies. And we've since learned that that's a really hard thing to do at scale. And it's best when you have a really great leader at the helm of a company who's responsible for everything full stop, is supported and augmented through Decada's team as that hands-on advisory board that I've talked about. And so like,
In the very beginning when we acquired Workshop SLC, I was really excited because that meant we could go and hire a six-figure marketing lead over both brands. Whereas with one company, if you can afford a VP of marketing, you sure as hell couldn't afford a VP of HR. It's like pick one area. And naively at the beginning, the vision was, cool, if we have five companies, we could at the Decada Group level.
we could go have a head of HR, a head of marketing, a head of finance, and fractionalize that into the portfolio. Problem is great CEOs, great operators who run our companies, they want autonomy on that, and they want to hire internally or externally on their own for that. And we set up guardrails and we make sure that the right things are being done, but we want the CEO of our companies to know that they have full autonomy to run their marketing the way they want to run it, to work with the right.
kind of HR practices and there's power in specialization that's hard to do when you have one CMO over five companies, right? And so that was like a thesis we had in the beginning that frankly was just wrong. And we just had to slowly iterate away from over the past few years. And today the goal is autonomy and independence within our portfolio.
Nick Berry (29:58)
Mm-hmm.
So what else are you doing to create an environment where you can attract and keep the best operators?
Chase Murdock (30:18)
Yeah, I
I think one is we have a lot of places to plug great talent into our portfolio as we get to know them and they get to know us. So and maybe that's not directly into the operator seat. Maybe that's coming and being a really great lieutenant to another operator while we're out searching for a deal to acquire. We've broadened our kind of network of folks that we want to work with one day. The question is just when.
and on what acquisition in the future. We're developing a lot of talent internally, where they're maybe holding a director or VP level role today, but in a few years, we see them running one of our companies. And one thing that Adam and I have learned is people is the hardest part, first of all. That's always the area where things go sideways. And so when you get someone great and they're aligned to our long-term vision and values and they...
are good at what they do and we want to invest in them, they are worth a lot. And we do a lot to ensure that they stay with us. And so one thing we've learned is that really great operators find a way to ensure that they have opportunity to go make millions of dollars. They're creating their own journey and we want to enable them to create that financial journey for themselves. So whether that's getting them into the cap table, whether it's just a really strong salary and profit share, finding ways that great people
can write their own story within our portfolio and can kind of make meaningful money along the way. We're very careful who we put into these roles. We want to get to know them really well and we want them to know what we're all about. But once we found great people, it's finding ways to ensure that they're incentivized and motivated to stick around with us for not a few years, but for 10, 20 years. And so my dream one day is that we have
someone who's in a junior role in a company we're going to acquire one day, who as part of our acquisition, we're able to help realize their potential and promote them into a mid-level role. And then at one point they want to apply to work in a more senior role in another company of ours. And we sponsor that and they come and they run as a VP in one of our other companies. We're continuing to get to know them. They're continuing to get to know our values. They like what we're all about. And at some point we get a deal under LOI that's the
perfect fit for this woman who's kind of progressed her career through us. And we say, Stephanie, is this a company you'd be interested in running for us? And then eventually she finds her way to the cap table. And I think there's opportunity on this kind 10, 20, 30 year journey that we're building for for great talent to build their careers within our ecosystem. And it's such a win-win if we do, because we run our companies a little distinctly, and if they're good at that, we want them to come run another one of our companies.
And so, you know, a lot of the reasons I do podcasts like these and, you we write our annual letters is to be really clear about who we are and what our values are. And to us, that's a good opportunity to attract the right people and turn away the wrong people. And the wrong people doesn't necessarily mean bad people. It's just like, we're not a good space for someone who like think a private equity CEO who's coming in to come perform a turnaround, fire a lot of people, extract a lot of value, drive a lot of growth.
Nick Berry (33:11)
Mm-hmm.
Chase Murdock (33:24)
and go and exit the company in three to five years. Probably someone who's exceptional at creating enterprise value and getting a good return on investment for a private equity firm, but they would flounder and destruct a lot of value in Decada's ecosystem. And so for us, we've over the past few years tried to get really, really clear on what we're all about, who thrives in our ecosystem and almost like ignite that as a beacon so that the right people can make their way to us.
Nick Berry (33:38)
you
Chase Murdock (33:51)
And yeah, I think over time we'd love to add more structure to this program, but today it's a little loose. But yeah, we've got a lot of people who we would love to one day work with and we're all the time looking to add people into that network.
Nick Berry (34:05)
Do you think that the good operators self-identify, do they identify themselves as operators or is it kind of muddled for them like maybe I'm an entrepreneur or maybe I, or do they know like I want this, these are my criteria, this is my thing?
Chase Murdock (34:16)
Two questions.
Yeah,
I get a combination of both. think like there are people who are good leaders that maybe don't think they want the operator role. And so that dynamic does exist. I think there are people though that know they can be great leaders and are willing to put in the work and want to run a company and don't want to go chase the corporate ladder grind in New York, right? And they want to run a small company.
they were around small business growing up maybe, or they're just burnt out on the venture capital treadmill. And they're like, I like leadership, I like building teams, I like recruiting people, I like the autonomy of that. But I don't like being isolated alone. I like the idea of a partner like Decada. And I don't wanna personally guarantee all the debt maybe. So it's kind of like this Venn diagram of if they're...
willing to take on the risk, they want to go acquire a company, they want to go lead a team, they're probably going to go do that and they're probably going to go do that without Decada Group. However, there's a lot of people I'm realizing where they're maybe a little more risk averse. They don't want to PG the debt or maybe they've searched for two or three years, they didn't find a good company and they want a partner. And they would be a phenomenal equity holding CEO of a company that Decada runs alongside them.
And we feel like we can be a good partner to them. And so we've been looking lately at a lot of deals where it's someone who's been searching to acquire a business in Utah. Either they've kind of come up empty handed or they just haven't been able to get the deal flow that they want. And they want to partner with Decada Group, own a meaningful amount of the cap table, but in a minority position. Partner with Decada, we provide the capital. We provide some of the guardrails to ensure that the company thrives and leverage some of our playbook.
And that's turning out to be a really interesting opportunity for us. But at the same time, we also acquire companies where we don't have an operator in place. We're looking within the organization post acquisition to see if there's someone who's a fit. We're doing recruiting post acquisition to find the right fit. And in the meanwhile, we're running the company. And so we've done all types of deals. And what I think we found is to not rush someone into the operator seat because it's a very high impact role.
There's a lot of emotional pressure, not everyone's cut out for it. And even if they're a good CEO of $40 million tech company, it doesn't mean they're a good CEO of a $5 million small company. And so you've really got to find that right leader. And then once you find them, you got to do everything in your power to make sure they want to grow with you for the next 10 or 20 years.
Nick Berry (36:45)
And I guess that's a decision you want to get pretty right at first out of the gate, right? What you don't want to do is have an acquisition, put your operator in place, then realize really quickly that was a mistake. And now we've got this new brand that we've got to swap out.
Chase Murdock (36:56)
Yeah, yeah, and we've done it, you know, it's
hard. I think that it's hard to read people. You know, I kind of have this contrarian take that the best people at hiring in the world, the best people who are good at like reading people in interviews and doing reference calls and are maybe only 10 % better than okay interviewers. And on average, you get it right about half the time.
In other words, like to me, I think the success in building a good culture of people and a good organization comes from being able to follow that age old axiom of hire slow, fire fast and knowing you're going to hire the wrong people all the time. And you've got to be really good at having a culture where the culture spits them out or where you've realized, shoot, we made the wrong call. This isn't the right person. Let's treat them with dignity. Let's take care of them on the way out.
let's get them out of the organization so that we can get on the path going and finding the right person. In other words, the best people hiring in the world still get it wrong all the time. And so I think we've tried to get really good at the kind of post-hiring, are they the right fit? If they are the right fit, how do we invest in them? Hire them a coach, support them ourselves, give them resources and develop them. But if they're the wrong person, how do we ensure they get out of the seat as quickly as possible?
Nick Berry (38:14)
So I'm assuming that that probably is what sparked at least contributed to, uh, durable coming about is realizing that like there, there are, it's a support system that everybody needs to have. And I think, you know, like where I stand on some of the elements. Yeah.
Chase Murdock (38:29)
Yeah, we share a of similar philosophies here. I read
the article on the kind three different pillars of what a good leader needs and I completely agree with that. And I guess we can get into that. So our latest startup, our latest company isn't an acquisition, it was a startup. And we called it Durable. And Durable is kind of hard to explain because it's really like four businesses rolled up into one that we will eventually spin off as we scale it.
We were passionate about a couple of things. One is there is no strong convening body or community for company builders in Utah in small business. Out here in Utah, we have this really great group called Silicon Slopes. It's a community that puts on events. It's a media company. And if you're in tech, you attend Silicon Slopes events all the time.
They're great. They bring founders on stage who have won, who have failed, panels with venture capitalists. And if you're trying to go build a tech company here in Utah, there's an incredible organization that ensures that you can find like-minded people, get the education you need, build bridges and camaraderie and relationships with people so it's a less lonely journey. And then small business, which by the way, employs like 85 % of the state of Utah. Small business is...
is the largest swath of our economy, not technology. Small business is left with, I hate to say it, but crappy chambers of commerce that aren't putting on high quality events, that aren't doing a good job making the small business owners life less lonely and less difficult. And so we wanted to create essentially a community of company builders, of small business owners.
and throw anything from happy hours to fireside chats to educational workshops and create kind of this home for business owners to find their people and to make it a little bit less lonely. In addition to that, we wanted to create curated peer groups. I've been a member of things like YPO and Vistage, and I've been in and out of peer groups my entire career. And I've had some peer groups that have been just so valuable, they've truly changed my life.
And I've had some peer groups that have been just a complete waste of time. And it's hard to get the right peer group. And so what we wanted to do was curate within this network, this broad community of business owners, curate like-minded company builders who are kind of getting after it, want to make the journey a little less lonely, want to have this sounding board or layer of accountability that you don't have when you're building a small company in their peer group.
Vistage is like $15,000 a year. YPO is similarly, and so we wanted to go create kind of a durable, so durable's the company name, a durable peer group. And we now have three peer groups today that we're running. And beyond that, we offer coaching. So like business owner advisory and CEO coaching. And that's kind of one section of the business. Another section of the business is we've developed at Decada Group kind of
Two practices that work really well for us, one is in finance. We feel like we know what a good small businesses P and L needs to look like, what metrics to pay attention to and how to make it so that the finances aren't just sitting in a QuickBooks account that the business owner never looks into. But at the same time, a business owner doesn't need a McKinsey BI dashboard. And we've found over the years, tacking to the left and to the right and trying to find the right solution, we've found a really good way
particularly for our operators to ensure the right metrics, the finances, gross profits, some of the margin or some of the ratios that you need to pay attention to, how to bring that front of mind to the operator. And so we launched our fractional CFO and accounting bookkeeping service. So Durable has a division that does accounting, bookkeeping, fractional CFO work. And then the second area of this practice that has kind of worked for us is we still employ at the holding company level,
a small team on the marketing and growth side of things. And one thing I've seen over and over again is I've looked at deals, small businesses coming for sale, is most of them in their teaser as they market the business for sale, they say, and the best part of this company is we're not spending a dollar on sales and marketing, which is cool for a buyer because to you that's an opportunity. But what it also means is they have no idea how to go repeatedly and sustainably acquire customers.
And that's like a mantra that Adam and I have drilled into our companies since the very beginning days of Tailor Cooperative is it's valuable to go, even if you have to raise your prices to go find the margin in your P and L, it's valuable to go spend somewhere between two and 20 % of revenue to go repeatedly and sustainably acquire customers, whether it's through digital marketing, whether it's through an outbound sales process, and every business needs to have a funnel and you need to understand how a prospective customer enters your funnel.
how you successfully convert them toward the end of your funnel and how they can become customers. And you need those unit economics to be profitable. And sadly, like a lot of businesses just don't really pay attention to that. And so we launched as part of Durable, Durable Fractional CMO and Growth Agency Service. And so we're kind of taking the mantra that we've whipped into our companies inside our portfolio externally and we're offering it externally. And then the fourth business unit. So if the first is community and peer groups,
The second is fractional CFO accounting and bookkeeping and the third is fractional CMO and marketing. The fourth is in a few weeks, we are launching our business brokerage. And so we want to be a transaction advisor and a sell side representative of Utah business owners. So we want to be the first call when business owners are thinking about selling. And we kind of have this vision that if we can do that well across durable.
Ultimately, that's going to be really good for Decada Group's 20-year vision, where we want to get first access to great deal flow. We want to have a broad network of potential operator talent. And we want to kind of make a dent in the small business community here in Utah. We want there to be more small businesses, not fewer. And so Durable is kind of an opportunity for us to really take all these values that we've only been able to really inject into our portfolio.
and start to offer them beyond the four walls of our portfolio. And it's really fun. We launched it four or five months ago. Immediately, we're on a 400,000 a year revenue run rate. And it's been received really, really well. And so we're kind of in growth mode. At some point, we are going to hire one or two or three operators to come and run each of these divisions. And they will snap into our portfolio structure that already exists, where they become operating companies underneath Decada Group.
Right now it's a little blurry because the team at Decada is like, we're the ones running durable. And so there's a lot of blurry overlap, but the vision is at some point we have two to four of those business units really work out. And those become operating companies for Decada Group.
Nick Berry (45:17)
Yeah.
Yeah, I could see it being a little bit blurry when you're having to throw you guys are sharing an operator hat.
Chase Murdock (45:25)
Yeah, yeah. But you know what?
It's fun. It's good to be back in the trenches. Like it's reminded me that zero to one startups, it's a young person sport, man. Like it's fun, but it's all encompassing. And it's cool to be in the trenches. It's fun to be tinkering on a website. It's fun to be sending first invoices out and getting, you know, client understanding. Yeah. Great point. Very true.
Nick Berry (45:37)
Yeah.
It's great market research, right? Like that's your ear is close to the ground.
Yeah. So, there's a lot of pros to it, but that's not your plan. That's not your role long-term.
Chase Murdock (45:57)
Yeah, I think
though that one thing that I think Adam and I have learned to get comfortable with is to not be too precious about what our long-term role is. In tech, there's a saying that gets used a lot, which is like, do things that don't scale in order to reach scalability. I think like if you're too precious about structure and how things should be and what my role is,
A lot of things just wouldn't get done and get done the right way. so sometimes you got to take your capital allocator hat off and go jump into the trenches and launch a business. if launching that business is the right move for our 20 year vision. And I think we've been cursed and blessed with the opportunity to come and step in and have to run our companies from time to time when we...
kind of place an operator who's not the right fit, or if God forbid, a good operator chooses to leave and we've got to come in and stabilize and run the company and plug new leadership in. And I think we've always been able to do that because by background, Adam and I, we're not investors. We're not capital allocators. We're entrepreneurs. We're company builders. We love to operate. That's what we do. And so I think being able to pull that tool out of the toolkit when it's needed has been really, really helpful for us. And also it's good.
for building rapport when we sit belly to belly with the business owners. It's not like we're these Wall Street, Holdco, Patagonia vest wearing, finance bros. We've run a company with, we feel your pain. We've had cashflow issues, we've missed payroll. And I think that's important for people who think they wanna run a holding company is I think it's especially in the small business side of things, you're not sitting in an office.
reading books in the Wall Street Journal and looking at Deal Flow all day. It's just not how it works. You've got to love the journey. You've got to love the process of jumping into the trenches and supporting an operator on a small crisis. And we do. And I think Adam and I, to us, this kind of feels like our multi-decade life project, right? It's really, really fun to support operating talent that
wants to go out there and make a dent in the industry and grow this company and hire great people and build a great culture. And it's fun to support them. It's fun to guide them. It's fun to recruit people who want to get into that game and bring deal flow and capital to the table so that they can. It's fun to run summits where we gather our operators and our leadership teams together and work on how we make them better leaders. And we thoroughly enjoy that. it kind of comes with, you know, sometimes we have to take fun in the...
Okay, it's Tuesday and we're going to go run one of our companies this week. You know, we've got, and there's curve balls right and left, you know, keeps us young and keeps it fun.
Nick Berry (48:33)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah. And I mean, so your joy comes through in the conversation. And so does the, your aptitude and your knowledge for what you're doing. Like you guys are savvy. I love what you're doing. And I appreciate what you're putting into it.
Chase Murdock (48:50)
Thank you. No, thanks for playing.
it. I think like the, I'll get off my stump speech in a second here, but I think, I think what most people don't realize is small business is on the decline. Entrepreneurship is on the decline and it's harder and harder with globalization, technology, AI. It's harder and harder for the average small mom, pop business, the average main street business to keep up with the larger companies that have more resources, more talent, more capital access to AI.
Nick Berry (48:57)
Thank
Chase Murdock (49:22)
And so I think there's something really cool about this trend that I'm seeing in acquisition entrepreneurship of people who are saying no to consulting and private equity in Wall Street and saying yes to, want to go run a plumbing company. I want to go run a tree services company. And I want to take my energy and put it toward a local business that employs people locally where money stays in the economy, where like,
It adds to the richness of our cities and neighborhoods having local businesses. Like we say this all the time, but like, I don't want to live in a Salt Lake City where the corner of Maine and Broadway is an Amazon pickup locker, not a coffee shop or not a local restaurant or not a local business. Like our communities, our neighborhoods and our cities are better because of having small companies. And I think the good news is there's a lot of money to be made in starting and acquiring small companies and running them well. It's less glamorous.
Nick Berry (50:16)
Right. They're not all passion
Chase Murdock (50:18)
You're not going to
Nick Berry (50:18)
projects.
Chase Murdock (50:18)
find yourself on the cover of Forbes, but you're going to find that it can be a very fulfilling life and it can be very good for your community, great for the people that you employ, and it could be great for you individually as well.
Nick Berry (50:29)
Absolutely. Yeah. I love the perspective. It doesn't have to be a passion project. There's tremendous value there. Right. So the opportunity is.
Chase Murdock (50:37)
Yeah, I even remember
as I was in my first or second year building Tailor Cooperative I remember listening to this HBS podcast episode. And I've since gone back and tried to find this thing and I have not been able to find it. If someone listening can track it down and send it, would really appreciate it because I remember having a small light bulb moment listening to this episode because the kind of premise of the episode was there are
tens of thousands of millionaires in America that you wouldn't know are wealthy. They're behind the scenes attending their kids' soccer games, running small manufacturing companies, running small trades companies, running a small print shop, and they've been doing it for 15 years. It's not sexy. They're not driving a Ferrari, and they're not on the cover of their local business publication, but they are...
They have a great work-life balance. They're tending their kids' soccer games and they're amassing wealth. And the purpose of this podcast episode, and this was back like 10 years ago, was to shine a flashlight on that section of the economy. And I just remember that hit me and it was like, man, that's a really cool lifestyle. Like you get to work on something intellectually challenging. You get to do something hard. You get to make money while you're doing it, go create an appreciating asset that drives equity value. And...
have that great work-life balance, be present in your community, have a small team that you're nurturing and supporting and investing in. And I think that's a really cool thing. And I kind of feel like part of our duty, those of us who have seen that side of the economy is to go and evangelize that and try to make it appealing and sexy because Lord knows TechCrunch isn't gonna do it, right? And so, anyway, I digress, but.
Nick Berry (52:11)
Right. Yeah.
No, I think you make a great point. And I think you guys are great evangelists for it. So, I mean, you're a wealth of knowledge and I appreciate you coming in sharing everything that you have. I'm definitely interested in seeing like watching you guys in the trajectory and keeping an eye on how things are going. But thank you so much for spending the time and sharing with our audience. I really appreciate it.
Chase Murdock (52:36)
Yeah, and thanks for the podcast that you put on and all these interviews that you put together every day. think resources like this are critical for the average entrepreneur and company builder. And so thank you for doing that part as well. But yeah, thanks for the conversation. It's fun to chop this up together.
Nick Berry is an accomplished entrepreneur and CEO, whose track record includes founding and leading numerous companies since 2002.
He is also a mentor and coach to other entrepreneurs and business owners who are looking for a trusted (and proven) advisor.
Among peers, colleagues, staff, and clients, Nick has been referred to as both 'The Business Guy' as well as 'The Anti-Guru', due to his pragmatic approach and principled leadership.
He shares his insights and lessons learned, along with those of his expert guests,
on his podcast, 'The Business Owner's Journey'.
