Through the SRT Lens: Laying the Foundation for Success with Ellie Hupp

Anderson Williams: Welcome to Bigger. Stronger. Faster. the podcast exploring how Shore Capital Partners brings billion-dollar resources to the microcap space. This episode is part of a series in which I interview members of the Shore Resource Team, better known as the SRT. about the work they do to support success across the Shore Capital Portfolio.

In addition to enabling portfolio company growth and success, each member of the SRT is growing themselves and their own careers on the Chief Financial Officer path. In this episode, I talk with Ellie Hupp, a manager on the Shore Resource Team. At the time of recording, Ellie was just a few months into her role with SRT. And as a result, provides unique insight on what the early part of the SRT journey looks like.

She shares how her move to SRT aligned with some great career advice she got from her dad. He told her earlier in her career to diversify her skills and experiences as much as possible, and that specialization could come later once she knows better what she loves and what she can be great at.

Ellie talks about how in just a few months, she’s gotten to see for the first time from an operator’s perspective, what really makes a company grow in scale. She also provides some insight on the 100-Day Plan that SRT helps implement with all new portfolio companies, and how this not only helps onboard a new leadership team to Shore Capital, but puts in systems and processes that will help the new company grow and scale throughout the hold period.

So welcome Ellie, and thanks for joining me today.

Ellie Hupp: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Anderson Williams: To get started, will you just tell us who you are and what you do and where you do it?

Ellie Hupp: So my name is Ellie Hupp. I am a manager on the Shore Resource Team here, and I just started a couple months ago, so pretty much brand new to the team.

Anderson Williams: So what were you doing before you joined?

Ellie Hupp: Before this, I was a manager in the financial due diligence practice at EY, Ernst Young here in Chicago, and I was primarily supporting buy-side and sell-side transaction work for private equity clients.

Anderson Williams: And what was it about the opportunity with Shore or the Shore Resource Team specifically that was the right next move for you as you thought about your career, your growth and that sort of thing?

Ellie Hupp: I actually received some great advice when I was about two or three years into my career from a mentor of mine who happens to be my dad. He’s where I get a lot of my advice. And he suggested that while I was early on in my career, I really focus on trying to diversify my skill set, my experiences, the different industries I worked on, technical skills, that type of thing.

And maybe say for the first 10 years of my career. And then as I get further into my career, he suggested that that was really the time to specialize more and figure out what I’m really great at. So when considering going to Shore, I felt like it was a great way for me to continue to really diversify that technical skill set that I have and continue learning more about how businesses actually operate versus just being on the advisory and consulting side.

So I just felt like it was a really great way for me to continue to expand my horizons while still pretty early in my career. I was about six years into my career when I made the transition to Shore.

Anderson Williams: And it’s only been a few months, but what has diversified? Any new skills that have already come into play? Any new muscles you’ve built?

Ellie Hupp: Yeah, I feel like my last job set me up really well for project success here. Like, just from a standpoint of the type of work I’m doing, I feel like I spent a lot of time working And I know how to set up financial statements and all that good stuff. So that prepared me well.

But I feel like here I’ve just been able to see it kind of peek behind the curtain a little bit more on the operating side and what these companies actually do to grow and be successful and scale versus in my previous role, I was more focused on just the transaction. We weren’t necessarily spending time with the management teams.

Post transaction and thinking about how they actually want to grow and become a better and bigger company someday. So yeah, that’s definitely been a different skill set that I haven’t been flexing beforehand, but learning a lot about it in these first couple months.

Anderson Williams: And what are you working on right now?

Ellie Hupp: Right now I’m working on the 100-Day Plan for our brand new dental services platform. It’s called Innovate32, and we just partnered with them earlier this year. And my team right now, myself and a couple other members of the SRT, are coming in to help. The company gets set up for essentially their next couple of years with Shore and get them on board for financial reporting, make sure that they are ready to work with Shore on any of our processes and policies that we have in place that are required for our portfolio companies and innovates brand new.

So we have a brand new management team. They haven’t had experience with each Shore. So we’re just making sure that they’re up to speed with everything that they need to do to be a successful member of the Shore family.

Anderson Williams: And talk a little bit more about that. We partner with a lot of family owned businesses.

We partner with a lot of physician led practices. These are small businesses, successful businesses, well run businesses, but now they’re a part of Shore. So talk a little bit more about the transition that that 100-Day Plan helps put in place.

Ellie Hupp: So our team is coming in and helping them set up financial statements that are on an accrual basis.

It’s getting them set up with bank accounts for corporate banking, setting up a new payroll system. Just kind of a lot of those more admin tasks that we want the doctor to be able to just focus on seeing his patients and not necessarily be dealing with a bunch of these more finance and accounting topics.

So that’s where our team really steps in and we’ve been working so closely with the management team, working hand in hand with them to make all of this happen. That way we’re kind of taking the lead on the finance and operational side and the doctors can stay in the clinics doing what they do best.

Anderson Williams: And recognizing like we partnered with a really great doctor and a really great business. But when you think about that business being 5x larger than what are those systems and processes and structures and reporting that are going to take it to that level and not sort of break in two years, right?

Like that’s what I think is so profound about the 100-Day Plan is the opportunity to take this new platform but truly set it up for five years from now.

Ellie Hupp: Yes, absolutely. We’re definitely doing that. Trying our best to make this scalable part of the plan here with this company is to acquire lots and lots of different practices and things are rosy and easy when it’s just one or two clinics that we’re working with.

But as we grow and scale, we want to make sure that this is a scalable operation and it’s not a headache every time we’re integrating a brand new clinic into the practice or into the platform.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. Have you worked on other projects? I know it’s all relatively new now, but have there been other projects that you’ve worked on?

Ellie Hupp: First one so far. So yeah, yeah, I joined a couple of months ago and after the first couple of weeks of kind of the standard training and onboarding that you would expect, I dove into this hundred day plan pretty quickly, which was a great way to kind of just go head first into a project here at Shore.

And one thing that’s been really cool is we just, as a member of the SRT, we get a lot of autonomy and you’re taking a lot of ownership of your projects right from the get go, which has been really exciting and I’m working with another member of the team on it. So he’s seen multiple 100-Day Plans before, so it’s been great to learn everything from him.

Anderson Williams: And it’s more than transactional, right? That 100-Day Plan process is not just for implementing the systems, but for being really beyond the deal team. The first relationship of a founding partner or a new executive team with Shore.

Ellie Hupp: Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s so important that this is the first time they’re really getting expose to Shore.

We’re oftentimes going on site with these teams and, you know, working with them day to day and actually building relationships with them, and it’s such a great way to set off on a good note with our relationship with these new management teams and seller founders. So it’s the first hundred days at Shore, but it really does kind of set the stage for the future of the partnership.

It’s very exciting.

Anderson Williams: For sure. And as you think about your trajectory, are you aspiring to be in a C suite at some point, a CFO specifically, tell me a little bit about where you’re building through this experience.

Ellie Hupp: Yeah, I definitely am. I would say that’s something when you first learn about the Shore Resource Team and about Shore Capital and hear that a lot of our team members go on to be CFOs or other C suite executives at our companies.

I think that definitely caught my attention from the get go and like I mentioned earlier, I’m about six years into my career. So to know that there could be a path for me into a C suite role at a private equity backed company is really exciting and I think there’s no better kind of foundation for it than being on the Shore Resource Team just because I will be working with executive just like who I want to be one day.

So yeah, that’s definitely what I’m aspiring to be. I don’t know exactly what the path will look like or when it will be, but I think that could be a great option for me.

Anderson Williams: So, Ellie, in your first few months here and with your first experience with Innovate32, what have been any surprises, any things that met or exceeded expectations, or were just worked out differently as you think about what you expected stepping into this role and what you found?

Ellie Hupp: I think when I thought about joining the Shore Resource Team, I was mostly thinking about joining the Shore Resource Team. I wasn’t thinking so much about everyone at Shore, everyone at our business. management companies, different board members that I would be meeting, family members and spouses of all of these people.

There’s just such a large family and widespread net that joining Shore casts, which has been so exciting and wasn’t necessarily something I was expecting. When I interviewed, I mostly interviewed with Jeff Williams, our COO, and other members of the Shore Resource Team and got to know them really well over the course of the interview process.

And I was so excited to step in and meet all of them on day one at Shore, and right from the get go, I was already meeting people in different groups at the company. So that was really exciting. Another thing that I’ve been really impressed by and wasn’t fully anticipating is just how much Shore commits to our people and our companies.

So on the people side, we have so many exciting events that we do throughout the year and actually joined in May, which I’ve been told is a great time to join. We have lots of fun events going on in the summer between our executive Leadership Academy, the summer offsite that we do in Michigan. We do different strategy sessions and lots of exciting things throughout the summer.

So I’ve just been able to meet so many different people through that, which has been really exciting as a new joiner and Shore is really committed to making sure we’re getting great experiences as employees here at Shore. So that’s been awesome. And then the way we support our companies, it’s the same thing.

We host this Executive Leadership Academy and bring them all in. We have strategy sessions for the different companies to make sure that they have their mission and vision aligned with where their company is going and growing over the life cycle at Shore. So things like that have just been way beyond what I knew about just the SRT when I was preparing myself to join the team, which has been really exciting.

Anderson Williams: And I think there’s sort of a network effect within Shore, given the sort of mutual and aligned interests from SRT to our Centers of Excellence, to our deal teams, to our lead independent directors, that we have so many different people coming from so many different angles. All trying to help and with a portfolio of 50 odd companies and a history going back with more companies.

How do you think about your journey and your ability to learn at the speed of private equity about that pattern recognition that you get across SRT from different projects and people sharing different insights from different projects? Just any thoughts about how that has worked?

Ellie Hupp: Yeah. Pattern recognition on the Shore Resource Team is truly no joke.

It’s something that we take so seriously and I did learn that throughout my interview process that we have certain projects that we do such as the 100-Day Plan that should be a learned experience that you can share with others who are going to go through that. And it’s documented and there are processes and different white papers and resources that we can reference for those projects.

But it doesn’t really stop there. We’re constantly refining and thinking of more ways and different enhancements that we can add on to these processes to make sure that we have this documented approach that we can use going forward. And it’s just always getting better and always creating additional resources for our portfolio teams and different people at Shore to reference whenever they have a question that surely someone has had the same question before.

And as a new team member, I can actually go out and find those answers because someone at Shore has done it before and has already seen that pattern and found a way to document it. Like I said, during those weekly meetings, we’re constantly saying, Hey, we’re running into this issue, or, Hey, we have this new idea.

Has anyone ever tried something like this before? And there’s just so many resources on the team, not just the Shore Resource Team, but at Shore as a whole. And that’s so valuable to our companies when we’re able to go take those shared learnings and apply them to the current project we’re working on.

Anderson Williams: I want to go back to your dad’s advice about diversifying in the early part of your career.

You’ve been a consultant, now you’re an internal consultant within the Shore Resource Team. How has that changed the way you think about your work and your role as a consultant?

Ellie Hupp: Yeah, it definitely requires a bit of a reframe of your mindset. Because in my previous role as an external consultant, we were very focused on the transaction and not so much focused on how the business plays out.

We’ll transform post transaction. So now as a consultant here at Shore, we are doing everything we can to think about what the work we will do today, how that will impact our portfolio companies down the line. So yes, I’m working on a 100-Day Plan right now, and we’re very focused on this 100 days and executing the tasks that we need to complete within these hundred days.

But everything we do is focused on making sure that these companies will be set up for success in the future. And that’s absolutely been a mindset shift for me. Because I was a lot more focused on, you know, an individual transaction in my previous role. And now we’re so forward looking, we’re thinking about growth, we’re thinking about different ways to transform the company and what that will look like, whether it’s, you know, by adding on additional acquisitions, or whether it’s by just growing top line growth with your base business, there are different ways it can be done.

And that’s, uh, It’s definitely something that I will be learning and one way to diversify that skill set as I’ll be continuing my time here on the Shore Resource Team.

Anderson Williams: Yeah, in many ways, you’re moving from a kind of engagement by engagement way of thinking about consultation and now as part of the SRT, you’re investing in a company.

I mean, you are setting the stage for that company to find success three, four or five years down the road and you’re a part of that company and that company is a part of you in some ways. Appreciate it.

Ellie Hupp: Absolutely. I’m hopeful that I’ll be working on this new dental platform in five years from now. I hope that I keep that relationship with them and we can support them throughout their time during the Shore hold.

I hope that they will find lots of ways to engage SRT throughout their time and even down the road looking five, six, seven years, whenever the time comes for this company to sell, we SRT is super involved in that process too. So it’s definitely much longer. period of time that we’ll be working with these companies, and that’s something really exciting.

Anderson Williams: Is there anything I haven’t asked you about your experience that I should have asked you?

Ellie Hupp: Yeah, I think I just have to give a shout out to the team. Everyone who we work with on the Shore Resource Team is so wonderful, and it’s a team of very intelligent, go getter, positive, excited, energetic people, and everyone is just so willing to help out and willing to bring someone in as a part of the team and make sure that they’re feeling like they are part of the family and feeling like they are well supported.

So I think that’s been one of the most exciting things about my first couple months here has been just getting to know everyone on the Shore Resource Team and not just the Resource Team but Shore as a whole and that’s just been a great way to kick things off. So definitely enjoyed that.

Anderson Williams: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure and check out our other Bigger. Stronger. Faster. episodes as well as our Microcap Moments and Everyday Heroes series at www.shorecp.university/podcasts, or anywhere you get your podcasts. This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners with story and narration by Anderson Williams. Recording and editing by Austin Johnson. Editing by Reel Audiobooks. Sound design, mixing, and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Ellie Hupp.