Ramsey Sahyoun

Buying businesses @evergreensvcs

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

1/ Long thread on reinvestment of internally generated cash flow. One of the biggest things I’ve learned from people on Twitter is the power of reinvestment. Interestingly it’s core to our strategy @evergreensvcs but I never really appreciated it

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

@PrivatEquityGuy Exciting Mikk! Where are you moving to?

[PrivateEquityGuy (Mikk Markus) @PrivatEquityGuy]

Ramsey Sahyoun is the Co-Founder of Evergreen, one of America’s most interesting acquisition machines.

He and Jeff Totten started the firm when they were 25 and 27 years old. Today, they’ve acquired over 160 companies and completed 47 acquisitions in 2025 alone. The portfolio does $1.5 billion in sales and $250 million in EBITDA.

We discuss:

- Why they chose MSPs
- The lessons from their first acquisition
- What went wrong with an early roll-up attempt
- How they built a proprietary sourcing engine
- Why 80% of their deals are proprietary
- How talent, goal setting, and value creation became central to Evergreen’s operating system

Enjoy!

Timestamps:
0:00 Evergreen’s scale and long-term hold model
2:06 Discovering private equity and buying private companies
4:14 Meeting Jeff Totten at Alpine Investors
5:53 First acquisition and current portfolio
10:23 Leaving Alpine and starting young
12:18 The first 6-18 months after closing
13:15 What went wrong with an early MSP roll-up
18:44 Building Evergreen’s sourcing engine
23:07 The value of having a large acquisition database
26:09 How to build trust with business owners
34:02 Evergreen’s M&A, talent, and playbook flywheel
41:54 Lessons from 160 acquisition post-mortems
44:22 Setting big goals and planning backward
47:16 One-page plan and quarterly renewals
48:53 What Evergreen learned from Alpine and Graham Weaver
51:27 How Ramsey and Jeff’s roles changed as Evergreen scaled
54:21 What people misunderstand about Evergreen
56:48 Closing thoughts from Ramsey

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

@PythiaR Two great tweets here and it’s all bots replying. Out of control! Miss the old discourse on here.

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

@TiehackCapital Hey, want to talk about this, doesn’t look like your DMs are open

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

@BigJohn043 Was surprised by this too. I was also a bit confused bc the graph says that it’s showing earnout divided by upfront purchase price, not total purchase price. So would imply a lower % of total purchase price. Still a high %, but that chart confused me (maybe I’m dumb)

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

We are looking into acquiring RIAs. Anyone here that knows the space well?

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

@GoodsCapital 🙋‍♂️ we are buying muni services businesses and are looking at this space

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

@Jadrolinija_cro @seba_rome Nobody was informed at all

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

This might be the best podcast episode ever if you’re into decentralized compounders. Howley is remarkably candid about their strategy. https://t.co/eU4TR2FlyO

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

@oscarazocar50 I don’t think it was that high when you proforma for the time Warner deal

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

Old news to a lot of folks on here but $chtr has repurchased 41.8% of shares since mid 2016, meanwhile ebitda less capex has basically doubled. Epic!

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

We are hiring at Evergreen. Come join us in our effort to build the world’s best home for businesses! https://t.co/VwoBoyGw6F

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

@MasaSonCap Looks like it’s gone from $70b to $90b but the debt multiple is roughly the same. Down just a bit.

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

@dcfdude @commandodev @McD_Investments Exactly. And the cash it generated ended up being so important. Didn’t have an appreciation for that but the book lays it out in detail which was awesome.

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

This is a truly outstanding book @McD_Investments

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

@commandodev @McD_Investments Too many to list but a couple takeaways were the pricing power at See’s (9.5% cagr in price in the first 12 yrs of ownership) and working capital mgmt creating cash in the textile biz. Just great detailed brk content, not the usual Buffett quotes

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

@NYCJ3 Such a great point. People got disconnected from just how much cash a business has to produce over some reasonable period of time to be worth $50B. Hint: it’s a lot!

[Ramsey Sahyoun @ramseysahyoun]

@dcfdude @fortworthchris I’d prefer sfr or multi-family with a % of rent revenue model, seems like the most predictable revenue model. But I’m not an expert on the industry by any stretch