About Retained Earnings
On business quality, operational improvement, deal dynamics, and long-term capital allocation. All from inside the work.
Most investing publications are written from the outside looking in. They describe what good businesses look like after the fact, whether it be in the footnotes of a 10-K, in a post-mortem after the exit, in a case study cleaned up for the classroom. That is not the intention here.
As a VP of Investments at a permanent capital vehicle focused on acquiring and holding middle and lower middle market businesses, I spend my days sourcing deals, building models, running diligence, and preparing memos on companies doing negative to $50M in EBITDA. We then buy some of them and operate them for a long time, with no previously anticipated exit date.
Retained Earnings is where I write about what I’m learning. Not as a post-mortem but rather as it’s happening.
The questions this publication tries to answer:
What separates a great business from an average one, and how do you identify it before you own it, not after?
What does permanent capital actually change about how you operate and allocate? When you’re not managing toward an exit, what are you managing toward?
What actually moves a business post-acquisition? Not what should work in theory, but what works in practice, on a $10M EBITDA services company in a market nobody covers?
And how does the investor-operator stay sharp over a long hold, when the benchmarks are vague and the feedback loops are slow?
These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re the ones I work through on a daily basis. Writing is how I think, and publishing is how I stay honest about what I actually know versus what I’m still figuring out.
Four categories, one through-line. Each section approaches the same core question from a different angle: what does it take to own and build a great business?
The Business
What makes great businesses great. Moats, unit economics, management quality, and reinvestment capacity at the lower middle market scale. The goal isn’t to describe what’s already obvious from the public markets. It’s to understand what durable competitive advantage looks like at $0M–$50M EBITDA, where the data is messier and the edge is harder to find.
The Operator
Post-acquisition reality. What actually changes a business (and what doesn’t). The 100-day plan, the management conversation, the KPI that matters versus the one that gets reported. Most private equity writing treats operations as a checkbox. This section treats it as the main event.
The Deal
Middle market dynamics, deal themes, and special situations. How permanent capital changes the underwriting — what you can pay, what structure makes sense, what risks are acceptable when you’re holding forever versus selling in five years. The deal is where the investment thesis meets reality; this section is about closing that gap.
Midweek Momentum
Occasional. The personal layer: performance systems, what I’m reading and testing, and the investor-operator as a professional athlete thesis. Only when there’s something worth saying.
If this sounds like something you’d read, subscribe below. If you want to comment on something I’ve written, I’m easy to find.
Kyle Scheetz
VP of Investments, Enduring Ventures
