
At Bluestone, our thing is entrepreneurs. There can be many different flavors of “entrepreneur,” from the bootstrapping startup to the multi-generational family business, but the flavors that most interest us all have two things in common: meaningful ownership in some sort of enterprise; and meaningful involvement in the day-to-day operations of that enterprise. Which leads us to the term “owner-operators.”
Owner-operators (let’s call them OOs) can exist in any company, public or private. Our advice and service focuses on OOs who own and run private companies. But it’s not surprising that when it comes to investing in public companies (an area where we utilize a small number of carefully selected investment managers), OOs show up frequently amongst the most attractive investment candidates.
This graphic from investment manager Horizon Kinetics highlights the difference between the typical agent-operator model and OOs1:
