It has always bothered us that the humble, traditional businesses - small but never often regarded as quintessential, was not taken as an investable reality. Organisational sizes aside, it has mostly to do with our belief in the business world that public-listed firms, blue chips, big multinational conglomerates are the stable, safe and high return investment option; that technological startups are the equivalent for the big guys; and the average small businesses we are familiar with do not sit well with the crème de la crème.
We at Antara Capital however, gave this more thought.
A great number of small businesses is being run by your day to day people. These businesses are simple, direct and often cash based - it means liquidity. They are also being run mostly by the owners, thus you can expect there is a strict overseeing by the management. Small businesses are not perfect. It has problems, often chaotic, and always have the tendency to make the un-strategic move. These imperfections very much are deadly to growing gracefully, organically. For us, our strategic involvement in small businesses take all that issues faced by the small businesses away and, with little cost sapping change as possible to the original way of running the businesses, repackage it into a form that works well, maintains efficiently, allow for change and looks remarkably organised, poising for future high speed growth. We seek to allow original owners continue to be the controlling owners so that you can grow organically without losing your character - which means without selling away your souls. Simply put, for us at Antara Capital, the underrated small businesses are the capitalist's equivalent of a nerve surgery without replacing your nerve with man-made devices; it puts to test the completeness of our abilities and the wilderness of imagination necessary in bringing old together with new in an final tectonic piece of beauty: this is an acid test of every investor's skill.
The excuses capitalists gave for ignoring traditional small businesses and consciously focus on technology based start-ups, is because of the flame of getting rich overnight and the relatively little payback with regard to scalability or the inability of a small business to truly escaped from its cocoon.
However, Antara Capital believes otherwise - it is rather because small businesses are too difficult for most to handle and appreciate, and that only the most accomplished understand how to deal with the complexity of an existing bottleneck and how it gives depth to our investment portfolio. Investing in a small business skilfully marks the men from the boys. Many think that investing in the next Facebook and Google is what constitutes greatness, however, we at Antara Capital think that it would be well worth our time cutting our teeth in small businesses.
If you are an existing small businesses, facing bottleneck to transform, wanting to do something about it but unable to pay for expensive and arrogant consultants, please do give us a call. We will try to keep your firm 90% business and 10% management so that you get to keep your essential spirits closer to heart with growth capacity.