With an aging population in the U.S., Teamshares is betting this market will grow even bigger, which is why since 2018, it has snapped up 84 small businesses from retiring owners. These owners like its pitch. Though Teamshares says that it sometimes pays below market price for a company, it installs a new president that it trains and grants 10% of the business’s stock to its employees. Moreover, it promises to increase those employees’ ownership to 80% within 20 years. It sounds almost valiant, like when KKR bought out a door company in 2015 and promised every employee a payout of at least $15,000 if the company met its targets when sold. When in 2022, KKR sold the company for 10 times what it paid, its 800 employees saw a payout of $360 million.

1. Sounds ambitious and I like that philosophy of buying to make it a more sustainable business model in the future

2. My BS detector went off a few times reading this. Something feels off but I can’t pinpoint my concern. Then again, I’m not a financial analyst so take it with a grain of salt.

3. If their business model is to replace POS systems, or find micro-opportunities to shave the business expense pie in their favor… this seems like a graveyard. There’s many success stories of startups in the past few years that went bankrupt during the pandemic.

And so while I’m rooting for them, I’m not optimistic that they’ll grow beyond their size since that industry has a lot of aggressive financial backers. Square for instance.