Middle Market Deals and how to buy, sell and raise capital from $5 to $500 million

Tomorrow morning, too few hours from now, I am scheduled to meet with a young entrepreneur for whom I serve as a mentor.  I sometimes wonder how much, if any help, I provide to him, but we get together every month for breakfast.  I hope that I serve as an effective sounding board, if nothing else.

This opportunity came to me through a friend, Greg Warnock, who had launched a venturing organization called "Junto Partners," designed to help young entrepreneurs, typically straight out of college, to launch small businesses, especially those that won't require large amounts of capital to reach some meaningful scale.  Greg, an entrepreneur at heart, has been working for the last several years as a venture capitalist at vSpring.

Greg invited to me, along with dozens of other professionals in the community, to support the organization with some mentoring time for the young entrepreneurs.

So, each month, I meet with Clint Carlos, the young founder and CEO of Garage Mahal, a high-end custom garage design firm.  Having completed a number of successful projects, he is presently working on scaling the business.  He is dealing with the sorts of realities all entrepreneurs face, trying to extract himself from the production process to make time to provide meaningful leadership and direction.

As part of the Junto program, the Junto Partners provide the necessary start-up capital to allow an entrepreneur to get the ball rolling.  Junto doesn't stop there.  By providing a network of mentoring resources, these young entrepreneurs get the benefit of vision that would normally come only with more experience. 

Clint hopes to create some value in his enterprise in the next few years.  That said, if he doesn't succeed, he's not entirely out of luck.  Each entrepreneur in the Junto program, has ownership in each of the other companies in his "class."  This aligns the interests of these young leaders such that they pull for each other's success.

Junto's approach seems to be as much about finding and fostering great entrepreneurs as it is about building good companies. 

You know, anybody can be an entrepreneur, but I sure wish that someone had taken me under his or her wing 20 years ago to teach me how to be a great entrepreneur.  Don't you?