Episode Description
Welcome to Season 3 of Empowered Owners!
In this episode, Chris Fredericks, host and CEO of Empowered Ventures, discusses key milestones and achievements from the past year. He highlights the acquisition of Benoure Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning while also celebrating the ESOP’s success in surpassing a long-term goal ahead of schedule.
Looking forward, Chris outlines new multi-year goals and improved processes for future growth. He also introduces new team members, Christine Webb and Casey Grisez, who will be featured in upcoming episodes.
You won’t want to miss it.
In this episode, you’ll learn:
- Achieving Long-Term Goals Ahead of Schedule: Empowered Ventures reached a major milestone by growing its share price from $22 to $85 a year ahead of its 2025 target, showcasing its employee owners collective efforts and dedication.
- Refining Acquisition Processes: Developing post-closing and due diligence playbooks has greatly improved the company’s acquisition approach, ensuring smoother transitions for newly acquired businesses like Benoure.
- Sustainable Podcasting Approach: After initially releasing episodes weekly, Empowered Ventures is returning to a more sustainable bi-weekly schedule, ensuring each episode remains impactful and thoughtfully produced.
Jump into the conversation:
(00:00) Introduction and update on Empowered Ventures
(00:43) Acquisition of Benoure Plumbing, Heating & Air Conditioning
(01:22) Achieving the share price growth goal a year early
(02:35) Development of post-closing playbook for smoother transitions
(03:34) Creation of due diligence playbook for future acquisitions
(04:36) Adding new team members: Christine Webb and Casey Grisez
(05:15) Announcement of the podcast going back to a bi-weekly schedule
(06:11) Gratitude for the progress and support from employee-owners
How to Listen or Watch
Listen below or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Watch below or @Empowered_Ventures on YouTube.
Read the full transcript below the media links.
Episode Transcript
Chris Fredericks: Hello. Welcome back to Empowered Owners. I’m Chris Fredericks, President and CEO of Empowered Ventures. It’s been a few months since our last episode, so we thought it would be good to share a brief update. A lot has been happening this year at Empowered Ventures and our family of companies. Earlier in April, we acquired our fourth company, Benoure Plumbing, Heating and Air Conditioning in Vermont. Benoure is our first business in the construction and trades industry, which I and we are very excited about. I’d like to thank former owner Brad Benoure for choosing Empowered Ventures and also for staying on to continue leading this great business that Brad and his team have built.
The first few months working together have been awesome. Brad and his team have done a phenomenal job, and it’s been a lot of fun. I’m super excited about what the future holds for Benoure as part of Empowered Ventures. Also, a few months ago, as an ESOP, we released our annual share price, and this year we achieved a long term goal that we set in 2019. That goal was to grow our share price from $22 a share to $85 a share by the year 2025. So we achieved that goal a year early. Achieving this goal was incredible. It was such an exciting moment.
It’s a huge testament to all of our employee-owners and all of our businesses. I’m constantly amazed and impressed at the amount of pride and effort that our employee-owners put into their work and that continues to enable this enterprise to grow and succeed and build on what we’ve created here with this holding company model going into the future. So, thank you so much to all of our employee-owners for helping us achieve this big, significant goal that we set so long ago. We’ll also be announcing to our team a little later this year a new goal, a multi-year goal similar to this one in terms of number of years that’ll be coming here shortly in the future. Another update for us at the holding company. We’ve been hard at work at honing our processes and our playbooks and our approach. Now that we’ve done a few acquisitions over the last few years, we’ve gathered all of our learnings and we’ve continued to hone our processes. Earlier, like last year, we were able to build out a post-closing playbook and project plan, which ended up helping a ton with Benoure’s transition into Empowered Ventures.
That post-closing playbook, which a lot of acquirers would call an integration process, I hesitate to use that word too much because we don’t truly integrate the operations of our companies. Each company runs largely independently with independent leadership and systems. So rather than calling it integration now, I think of it more as a transition into empowered ventures. Our team put a lot of time and thought into building out that post-closing transition process into a playbook. And like I said, that helped a ton with Benoure. I’m also excited that this year we were able to put a lot of time into creating a due diligence playbook and project plan. Due diligence is the process that happens before an acquisition is completed. Mike and Emily here at the holding company especially put a ton of time and thought into developing that playbook.
I’m excited for the future because that Playbook is going to help us with future acquisitions in general. I can’t believe how much progress we’ve made building our approach to doing acquisitions. Four years ago, we had only done one at top value fabrics at TVF quite a few years before that, and now we’ve completed three more and we’ve learned a ton. And that should only make us better at this going forward. Finally, I’d like to add that we added two new team members to the Empowered Ventures holding company team. Recently, Christine Webb and Casey Grisez joined, and they’re already having a big impact on what we’re doing at our team, including achieving the progress we want to see. Casey and Christine will be joining the podcast for a future episode to talk more about what they’ll be doing for EV next, I’d like to share an update on the podcast. So we’re going to go back to releasing an episode every two weeks.
That’s how we started initially, a little over a year and a half ago, and we got a little ambitious and decided we would do it every week. And we did that for a while and that was a lot of fun. But it was also a lot of work. Going back to every two weeks, we’ll make this a little more sustainable and also ensure we have time to make sure each episode is meaningful and impactful and interesting. At least that’s our hope. So we’re going back to releasing every two episodes, starting with this one now. So the next episode will be out in two weeks. And initially we’re going to do a rerun of five of our favorites.
So we’ve had a lot of episodes over 30 so far. All of them have been fun. All of them have been great in their own ways. It was tough to pick five. I think we could have run a lot more favorites, but we picked five of our favorites that are going to run starting in two weeks, and we hope you enjoy those after that, we’re going to start releasing new episodes, and we’ve got some super fun topics planned, so I’m excited to bring those to you. Thank you very much to my team who’s helping produce these and envision what this podcast can be and continue to be in the future. Lastly, I’d like to thank you for listening and supporting both this podcast and Empowered Ventures. EV has only been in existence for a little over four years, which is unbelievable to me because it feels like it’s been around for much longer than that because it’s been so much fun and because so much progress has been made.
So, in just four years, you and all of our employee-owners, you’ve helped us get to create this foundation that empowered Ventures has now created with a terrific group of four companies and an ambitious future that we’re excited to continue on. As you have any ideas or suggestions for this podcast, I’d like to welcome you to continue to send those to us at [email protected]. Finally, I’d like to thank again our employee owners. I consider each and every one of you a partner in this project. Thank you for all you do every day to make your business more successful and create a brighter future for it. That’s all for today. Thanks for tuning in.
