01
Patient capital
Our money, our timeline
We’re not deploying someone else’s fund on someone else’s clock. That means we can do the right thing for a business in year three instead of the thing that prints a markup by Friday.
Approach
Buy it, build it, run it — like we plan to keep it.
Most holding companies are financial machines run by people who never touch the product. We’re the opposite. The people who own Ethos are the people in the businesses. Here’s how that actually works.
01 — First principles
Owning a business and running a business are supposed to be two different jobs. We never understood why.
The standard playbook splits them: investors own, operators run, and the two negotiate across a table. It works until the incentives drift apart — and they always drift apart. So we collapsed the table. At Ethos, the owners are the operators. The person betting on the business is the same person answering for it.
That changes everything downstream. We move slower on the way in and stay longer once we’re there. We’d rather own a few businesses well than a dozen at arm’s length.
02 — What operator-owned means
Three habits, not a thesis deck.
02
We do the work
In the business, not above it
Operator-owned isn’t a tagline. We sit in the product reviews, the sales calls, and the uncomfortable Monday meetings. We’ve run these plays before, and we run them with you.
03
Founders stay founders
We back people, then get out of their way
We don’t parachute in and gut the team. The people who built a business usually know it best — our job is to remove what’s slowing them down, not to replace them.
03 — Where we play
A narrow lane, traveled well.
- Sectors
- Automotive technology, B2B software, and service or agency businesses we understand
- Stage
- Profitable or nearly there — we’re owners, not a seed fund chasing the next round
- Size
- Right-sized for hands-on ownership: real revenue, honest margins, room to improve
- Geography
- Minnesota roots, but we’ll work wherever a good business and good people are
04 — Straight talk
We’re small, deliberate, and we say no a lot. That’s the point.
Ethos isn’t a fund with capital it has to deploy by a deadline. We’re operators putting our own time and money into a small number of businesses we believe in. That makes us slow to buy and very slow to sell — which is exactly what you want from a long-term owner.
We won’t pretend to be bigger than we are. Two companies today, more over time, and only when we can genuinely help. If we’re not the right home for your business, we’ll tell you that too.