Through the SRT Lens: The Evolution of SRT with David Korb

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 David Korb, a Director on the Shore Resource Team. David describes how the SRT is fundamental to the Shore Capital Investment approach, bridging the needs of the investment team and company leadership and enabling faster and better growth across the portfolio.

He shares several examples of the most engaging projects he’s worked on with SRT that have not only stretched his skills, but expanded his impact. David talks about what his prior career in consulting prepared him for and what it didn’t prepare him for as he joined the SRT. And finally, he talks about the evolution and growth of the SRT, including the opportunity for him to take on a mentoring role.
Welcome, David, and thanks for being with me today.

David Korb: Yeah, thank you for having me.

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

David Korb: Yeah, my name is David Korb. I am a Director on the Shore Resource Team, and I am based out of Chicago.

Anderson Williams: And in your own words, how would you describe the Shore Resource Team?

David Korb: Not to overstate, I think, the importance of the Shore Resource Team to Shore Capital, but I think the SRT, and by extension, the COEs is what makes the Shore Capital thesis and model really tick. I mean, we can welcome people to Shore, we can fill the gaps if there’s turnover in the management team, and we can provide extra ammunition to the extent that they need help in terms of doing an analysis, running a budget, interviewing new executives.

So long winded way of saying, like, we can go in and be the hands and the feet to the questions that the deal team’s asking you and really just enable more progress quicker for our portfolio companies.

Anderson Williams: And when you think about those projects that you work on, how do those come to be? Does the investment team come to an SRT member?
Does the company come? Just give me a sense of the operations for how those things come about.

David Korb: Yeah, the easiest one is the 100-day plan. So that’s just a very natural, hey, we closed a platform or hey, we’re about to close a platform investment staff, two to three members from the SRT, and they’re going to go welcome that company into the Shore family and all the processes that come with that.

From there. SRT members are fully part of Monday Morning Meetings where we hear the investment team debrief on the highs and the lows of each of the companies. And so we can organically hear about opportunities where we can plug in and Riley and Jeff can kind of poke and prod the deal team and say, Hey, I think the SRT would be really good for this project or that project.

Or also the investment team, to your point, they do come to us and say, Hey, we need some extra firepower. We’ve had some turnover in our teams, and it would be great to have a resource that knows Shore, knows our processes, and then can learn the company in a couple of days and be a fully-fledged employee of that company for however long is needed.

Anderson Williams: And in your experience, just give an example, maybe two or three examples, really for somebody listening who’s not familiar about any of the types of projects beyond the 100-day plan. What are some of the things that you have worked on?

David Korb: Me specifically, I’ve done, to your point, two 100-day plans.
That’s the bread and butter, that’s what you’ll do a lot of initially. Since then, one of the portfolio companies lost a lot of older customers in 2023. And so I helped run a re-forecast to look at the businesses that they’ve acquired and kind of rolled up into their portfolio. We looked to see, are they still going to be debt compliant by the end of 2023 and end of 2024? And what do they need to do in terms of levers to pull to restart the growth engine, to restart the customer acquisition process?
So that was one that was really engaging. I’m currently helping in an acquisition integration. Basically exercising a playbook where we say, Hey, you’ve closed two businesses in the past two weeks and your finance and accounting team needs some extra help.

So I’m going to manage the vendor relationships. I’m going to provide, make sure the data is coming from the companies that we just acquired to then repackage and provide to our vendors to do the various blocking and tackling to make sure we’re good from an audit and good from a tax perspective.
For me personally, the most engaging, challenging, interesting, trying project, all of the above, was. I was an interim Controller and interim VP of Finance for one of our portfolio companies for seven to eight months. So, took a company in November through the budget process and call it November, December, and then there was a strategic pivot with the company. And so I helped in the management team transition in terms of kind of recasting what our strategy was going to be and then how do we actually action that in the real world in terms of letting our partners know, letting our vendors know, and making sure that the company was set up for long term success.

And I wore a lot of different hats on that project and they weren’t all finance and accounting, and I’m better off for that, I would say

Anderson Williams: Just taking that thought a little bit further. What did you do before SRT and how did that prepare you to step into this role? And then maybe also how didn’t it prepare you to be in that role? Just curious about your background.

David Korb: So, I graduated from Butler University, stayed in Indianapolis, and did audit with PwC for two or three busy seasons. And then, candidly, for me, audit never really stuck, but I wanted to stay within the PwC family. So, I moved up to Chicago, moved into the deals advisory practice.

So, I did financial due diligence and networking capital type analyses for the better part of four or five years. Towards the end of that, though, I was seen as, The same analysis, the same workbook, the same deliverable, and the same type of meetings, just over and over and over again, which is fine in a vacuum.

But then furthermore, it’s you give a report to your client and you never really know what happens. Sometimes the deal would die. Sometimes it wouldn’t. Sometimes they would come back in a couple of months and want you to roll forward an analysis. And for me, I wanted something a little bit more. I didn’t know exactly what that was.

I was starting to think through that I wanted some operating experience and randomly happened to check LinkedIn one day, had a vague description of a job role that sounded fascinating to me and turns out it was the SRT and I was hooked from day one. I wasn’t really looking and two weeks later I had a new job.

Anderson Williams: And describe what that transition looks like. So in terms of both what you were looking for. Trying to nail down what was missing in that previous experience, but also in terms of your skill set and learning curve as you’ve stepped into this, wearing so many different hats and across a portfolio of companies, what did that transition look like?

David Korb: I would say I was in external client services and at PwC and Shore’s resource team is really like internal client services. I didn’t appreciate that from the outside looking in, but basically I’m an internal consultant for our portfolio of anywhere from 40 to 50 companies and hopefully growing.

And in terms of what I was prepared for and what I wasn’t prepared for, I was prepared for deal speak in terms of data that’s available, not available. How do I think about the financial analyses for acquiring companies or making tuck in acquisitions for our platform investments? But I wasn’t prepared for the operational in terms of preparing a board deck or going to a strategy session and helping prepare the management teams for their strategy sessions.

And so I basically I would do just the finance and just the accounting and hand that off. And I never got to see the rest. And that’s why I wanted to go get some operator experience or kind of what I would like to characterize as like. On the SRT, I’m getting operator experience with training wheels. I get to touch a lot of different companies, touch a lot of different industries.

So in that sense, it’s very similar to professional services. But then at the same time, I get to go deeper than just the finance and accounting. I still enjoy the finance and accounting, but now, like I said a minute ago, I get the chance to work on the board decks. I get the chance to help interview and hire and onboard executives to our various portfolio companies.

So I get more operator experience leveraging my professional services background. So in that way I was prepared, but at the same time you sit in a Monday Morning Meeting, you can update on a new platform and they’re like, yep, the quality of earnings is good. No major red flags. We’re going to keep going on.

And then there’s 15 other streams of diligence and you realize like, okay, what I did for five years was check a box. in a five minute conversation. And now we’re off to the races with all these other things. And the SRT can help with the finance and the accounting check the box, but then we can also go and be agile and be athletes and do all these other things.

Anderson Williams: So David, given the projects you’ve worked on, what are some of the big lessons learned around business or leadership or team as you’ve been able to step in and see multiple companies at multiple stages with multiple different projects?

David Korb: Yeah, I think especially on the 100-day plans that I’ve been a part of, you get to see the importance of prioritization.

With a 100-day plan, they’re new to Shore. That probably means they’re completely new to private equity. And so to them, the world is their oyster. I mean, Absolutely. Absolutely. We’re going to go conquer the world. We’re going to grow five times. We’re going to acquire all these businesses or it’s going to be organic growth.

And you have a really energized seller founder or management team, and you’re there for a 100-days and you’ve got a list of like 40 to 50 things that you have to do. And then all of a sudden they’re adding to your list. They’re like, Hey, what about this? Or what about that? And then you’ve got the deal team.
That’s also saying, what about this? Or what about that? So all of a sudden on our 100-day plans, our secondary project list is very large and it’s more lengthy, more detailed than even our standard things that we have to do. So all that to say, the importance of prioritizing when you’re in the seat of being a part of the management team, knowing my team’s bandwidth or my personal bandwidth can only handle one to two things, not four to five, that if the world was my oyster and I had all the time in the world and all the money in the world, I could go out and do those things.

But unfortunately, the limitations of time and money and just skill set of your own team. Right. That dictates what you can and can’t do.
Anderson Williams: Yeah. I’m curious to hear you talk about that because I can see a couple of things if I’ve just partnered with Shore and I’m excited about all the resources and I’ve got my punch list of things that I’m like, yes, come on in.
I’ve been waiting two years to try to do this and I can see that. But then you guys also come in with some very specific things that probably aren’t the sexiest top of the list things for the seller founder as well. How do you manage that communication and that tension and priority? Because it’s both and, but you’re setting them up to scale in ways they’ve never scaled.

They’re excited about the opportunity to scale. We have a playbook for how you do that. Just talk a little bit more about that experience, because I think that is the real world and really the right tension between an investment partner and that C suite and that company that’s excited to be in this new role.

David Korb: Yeah, I think you come in on a 100-day plan and really my perspective, I would say our team’s perspective is that first week. It’s not your job to go in and say, Hey, I got. 10 of my required standard procedures that I have to get done, knocked all of them out, or they’re all in flight. We had great kickoff meetings with management team.

They’re already so excited. If you try and throw so much new at them as compared to just meeting with them and hearing about their wants and desires and hearing about potential priorities that they may or may not give you, right? If you take the time to just learn from them, be respectful, learn from their business, then that sets you up for success.
Because if you don’t do that, then there’s no priorities. And, or then they think, Oh, this person is only trying to do the Shore way, the Shore playbook as compared to caring about me, caring about my business and how we can partner, right? Cause if you don’t thread the needle, right. Then all of a sudden Shores bought your business.

And now we’ve got a to do list. And you’re along for the ride as compared to if you come in and you respectfully listen and want to learn and partner with them, then it’s Shore has partnered with me. And now I get to go hire one or two key roles and we’re going to focus on our budget in terms of who we want to acquire or what type of new customers we want to go after.

And now the worlds are oyster in terms of unlocking potential as compared to, I’ve got all this checklist and reporting and mandated things that I have to do. And one week of just listening can totally change the tenor of a 100-day plan.
Anderson Williams: Abstract as you were describing those early interactions and that balance, how SRT is kind of the first face many people are seeing or experiencing, the first real world experience of Shore after a partnership.

Can you talk about that first impression and how critical that is, and how do you even prepare to step into that?

David Korb: It’s a good question because not only as you think about the first impression that we make after the acquisition closes, but just think about how tired, I mean, These seller founders or the management team that just happened to go through this sell process, it wasn’t a seller founder, you’re inheriting their dreams, their desires.
They built this baby and all of a sudden then they just sold it and the sale process is long, no matter how good it could go there’s always something that comes up. So in that one to two week period of you’ve sold your business to me, Anderson, and I’m going to start your 100-day plan. I’m going to leave you alone after sending you a congratulatory email.
And that time I’m going to get prepped. I’m going to read the various diligence reports. I’m going to talk to the deal team. I’m going to make sure that I know the why for this investment, what the management team, what their visions are for the partnership, what Shore’s vision for the partnership, and then I’m going to show up on that first week and actually learn about the day to day operations of the business.

It’s not right for me to go in and say, hi, welcome to Shore Capital Partners. Now you have to make a budget and you have to have weekly meetings and I don’t really care about how you run your business, but like you need to hit these numbers and you’re going to talk about it every single week. And I just shoved that down your throat.

Anderson Williams: One of the things that I know and really appreciate about working at Shore is the, intentionality with which we partner with sellers and founders and the types of businesses, the culture, the values, and SRT has to represent that narrative and is the first to kind of pick up the baton of that narrative post close.
So those first steps with the SRT are pretty critical.

David Korb: It’s important for the sellers to not feel like I was being courted by the deal team and they were the good cop and then now the transaction’s closed and now here comes the SRT and like the operations side of Shore and now these guys are all the bad cops and here’s my to do list.
That’s the last thing that we want at the SRT or also at Shore.

Anderson Williams: So I know SRT has changed quite a bit and has grown since you’ve been a part of it. Will you just describe a little bit about the evolution and sort of what you see and understand as. Next as Shore grows and as SRT grows to support that growth.

David Korb: Yeah. So I started on the SRT in January, 2023. I think there were like 13 or 14 of us since then four or five individuals have graduated to go be executives at Shore portfolio companies. And then we’ve hired. Basically net a growth of 10 people, right? So now we’re closer to 20 people and in the span of 18 months.

Now I’m one of the more experienced people, which feels crazy to think. Cause I feel like I’m still going into Shore every day and learning about Shore, learning about the SRT and then how we can serve our clients, meaning the portfolio companies. It’s cool to see that, you know, a lot of our. SRT alums go on to be CFOs, but that doesn’t have to be the case.

I think that we’ve all learned that your time at the SRT or your time on the SRT doesn’t have to be prescriptive. I would say most of us do want to go be CFOs, but keep in mind, you’ve just worked with Shore companies and Shore partners and Shore senior deal team members for the past two, three, four years, and so maybe there is an opportunity with a company or an industry that you really like.

And with a management team that you like and a sure investment team that you really like. If it’s not CFO, but you want to take a lower role in the finance and accounting or an operations role, I mean, you can really kind of craft your own narrative in terms of what’s your growth look like at the SRT and then also what your own exit strategy from the SRT to portfolio companies is.

And it’s cool to see us meaning SRT rally around and support you in choosing kind of what you want to do, what you want to make your professional journey look like.

Anderson Williams: Yeah. And in that spirit, I know that SRT has begun doing some mentoring. Will you talk a little bit about that? And I believe you’re doing some mentoring, both in terms of what that looks like.

And maybe if you went back to when you started what you would have enjoyed or appreciated about a mentor.

David Korb: I think that in the spirit of continuous improvement, the SRT is continually getting better at onboarding new SRT members. When I joined, it was a day or two crash course. And then on the third day, I was working on one of our portfolio companies, which was fine.

It wasn’t necessarily good or bad, but now with hindsight, I look back and I feel like I could have been better at being a part of the SRT quicker had that infrastructure been there sooner. So it’s encouraging to see that continually to evolve. For me personally, I love the opportunity to be a mentor for one of our new joinees.

I knew him previously whenever we worked very briefly together at PwC, but it’s an opportunity for me to share my experiences, my do’s and don’ts, again, from my perspective in terms of working at Shore and to coaching them through feedback. That they get from the portfolio companies or from the Shore deal team.

And I think that that’s important because if I want to go on and be a successful executive at a portfolio company with Shore, I’m going to have people that report to me, I’m going to be in charge of their development professionally and personally, and trying to balance the tension between work. and all the things that go on for people that happen, you know, from nine to five, but then also outside of nine to five.

And so being a mentor here at Shore gives me that experience selfishly, but it’s also life giving because I get to pass on lessons and I get to set up future SRT members for success and I personally find a lot of joy and drive a lot of value from that.

Anderson Williams: So, David, as you think about your time with the SRT and then your time moving forward, what has been your learning curve coming into the work? And then what do you still see as your learning curve as you look toward becoming an executive in the future?

David Korb: I’d say my biggest learning curve was being comfortable with the uncomfortable. Being willing to ask questions. In my previous life at PwC and Transaction Services, every deal was different and there were different companies and questions to ask.

It wasn’t monotonous by any stretch of the imagination, but you knew what you were working towards. It was the same three or four outputs, and there were challenges along the way, but that’s what you were always working towards. In the SRT and being an operator in a business and aspiring to be an executive at a business, there’s going to be things that come up that you just were never prepared for and you have to be willing to just roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty and figure it out along the way by sometimes brute force.

Most of the time, just by leveraging your network, either within the SRT as a still a member of the SRT or from your peer network that sure does a great job of making sure that, Hey, you may be part of portfolio company a, but you’ve got the whole rest of the alphabet of portfolio companies that you can go and reference.

And so knowing that you can be uncomfortable, not knowing the answer right away has been a valuable learning for me.

Anderson Williams: And as you think about your next phase of growth or your continued phases of growth in preparing to be in a C suite, what do you see as areas that as you take on your next projects, as you go into the next company and observe their C suite, what are you looking for? What do you know you want to work on to prepare for that?

David Korb: Yeah, trying to take opportunities where the SRT engagement could be multiple people, because then it would be very collaborative, as well as a potential for me to lead a 100-day plan. So something like that, where there’s multiple SRT individuals engaged, you get the chance to direct the process, but also work collaboratively with my own peers, and then by extension the management team.

So that’s one. And then I think just knowing that each company is not perfect, but each company does something really well. They wouldn’t be part of the Shore portfolio if there wasn’t something that they were extremely awesome at, right? How do they drive value? And so knowing that every company that you go to, you have the opportunity to pick up at least a nugget or two of knowledge, of insight, of maybe how an executive runs a board meeting.

Or how an executive goes about hiring and building out and supporting their team. I don’t think I appreciated that at first when I joined the SRT, that every day is the opportunity to pick up best practices from all of our different companies.

Anderson Williams: So as you think about your experience with SRT, as you think about your trajectory, what have I not asked that I should have asked to help tell that story?

David Korb: I would say what you haven’t asked, maybe what my favorite part has been and it’s just been the camaraderie within the SRT. You know, we all sit together. A lot of us travel from Tuesday to Thursday, depending on client requirements. But at the end of the day, we’re always together on Mondays. We’re always together on Fridays and we get to learn from each other and we get to go around the horn and talk about highs and lows and go through life together.

We’ve had a number of marriages on the team. We’ve had a number of babies on the team. And you know, it’s 15 to 20 people, plus or minus as people come and go, we’re sending them off to really cool opportunities and we’re welcoming new people to hopefully future really exciting opportunities as well. So I’ve loved the camaraderie of welcoming new people, onboarding new people, and then training people up for a really cool experience and opportunity to work in private equity, to work with companies that we really buy into their value props, and to do it collaboratively and not in a competitive environment.
I think it’s awesome.

Anderson Williams: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure and check out our 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 David Korb.

This podcast is The Property of Shore Capital Partners, LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, nor a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the terms of use page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.