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

I enjoy mentoring young entrepreneurs. Most of my mentoring is organized around Junto Partners, Greg Warnock's entrepreneurship project.

The young entrepreneurs in the Junto organization are some of the brightest, most ambitious and capable young people I know.  It is a lot of fun to see them building businesses and doing deals.  I wish I'd found someone like Greg when I was their age!

I received an e-mail from, Ryan Coombs, one of these young entrepreneurs today.  In part, the note said:

It was nice to hear that the advice was helpful.  From the sounds of it, Ryan got a win-win deal done and has an opportunity to create something great!

Clint Carlos, the founder of Garage Mahal Design, a Junto company, provided me with this video introduction to his company.  Garage Mahal customizes residential garages, typically for folks who have lots of cool toys to put in the garage (as can be seen in this video).

Garage Mahal, like HireVue is part of the Junto program run by Greg Warnock of vSpring (see my post on HireVue here).  In the video, Clint talks about how important Junto is to his success.  He also talks about some of the challenges he's faced getting to this point.

Clint's business model is simple and traditional.  The remarkable thing about Junto is its emphasis on helping young entrepreneurs to successfully launch a first business.

Watch and see!

Ryan Money, the CEO and founder of HireVue just sent this over.  What HireVue does is to faciliate video capture of employment candidates for prospective employers to use.  It allows the employer to get a much better sense of potential employees--before bringing them in for interviews.

Brialliant idea!

Watch this:

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.