How We Can Help
We had a meeting with some prospective partners recently who wanted to know how we could help them. They were having trouble implementing Netsuite. Could we do that? They wanted to source from more factories in China. Who did we know? And they wanted to be more effective with their marketing spend. What was our track record?
At the end of the day we do want to be helpful and it makes sense that anyone taking on a partner doesn’t want a freeloader, but honestly the way that we can be most helpful, and the thing that makes us stand apart from competing investment firms, is that we can give people and companies time to become whatever it is they are supposed to be.
There’s an old saying that if you give a man a fish, you’ll feed him for a while, but that if you teach him to fish, you’ll help feed him for a lifetime. And that makes sense, but it’s frustrating too because of delayed gratification and an indirect connection to outcomes.
A resolution I made in 2023 was to show more gratitude to others. One way I did that this year was by sending a long overdue thank you note to my college playwriting professor. I never did become a playwright, I told him, but I think about and/or reference his class, standards, and teachings everyday.
Warren Buffett says that he’s a better investor because he’s a businessman and a better businessman because he’s an investor. Well, I’m a better investor because I took playwriting with John Glavin, and a better businessman, too.
The point is that you don’t help someone or some business or some youth soccer team or some wannabe playwright by telling them what to do. Rather, the best way to be helpful is to foment conditions under which a person or business or team or wannabe playwright might have an epiphany that leads to sustainable success. And to ask good questions and give honest feedback.
At Permanent Equity the way we try to foment those conditions is by operating within a fund structure that gives us and our portfolio companies three decades to figure it out. That was intentional by design because we know that growth is not linear, that arbitrary timelines beget arbitrary results, and that it’s only through learning from mistakes that one figures out what works. And since we don’t need to gussy anything up to sell it in a short time frame, we’re also free to ask good questions and give honest feedback. While I’m loathe to ever say anything nice about or to Mark, those are two things he and his team do well.
The other thing is don’t beat yourself up about a bad result. John Glavin gave me an F on my first dialogue exercise, but he also asked a lot of questions in the marginalia. I’d never seen an F on a paper prior to then and it was disappointing at the moment, but then exciting. The reason is that I thought my F dialogue was pretty good; it was only then that I realized how much better it could get provided I had time and feedback and intention.
Because if you have time, feedback, and intention, you have everything you need to succeed.
– By Tim Hanson
