Shoreland Holdings

The name comes from a road in Wisconsin. There is a longer version of that story and it is better told in person, but it is the reason none of this has a clock on it. What we buy joins the rest and stays.

How we are built

Two kinds of company, held on two different clocks.

Most buyers have one model and make every business fit it. We are deliberately built for both, because the cash one throws off is what buys and keeps the other.

Companies that compound cash

Steady, unglamorous, strongly cash-generative. They fund what comes next and they are not sold to do it.

Companies held for generations

A position in a niche that would take a competitor a decade to build. Bought to be owned for forty years, not for a fund cycle.

What we look for

Companies whose product is written into a drawing by name.

Qualified into a spec, designed into a program, or relied on for decades — the kind of thing a customer specifies once and then does not change for twenty years.

Size: Ten to fifty people. One owner, or a family.
Where: Anywhere in the United States. We will travel to you.
Industry: Manufacturing, specialty materials, testing and inspection, industrial services.
Timing: No deadline. Now, years from now, or never.

Our commitments

What we won't do.

Every one of these is a promise you can hold us to, which is the only reason they are worth printing.

We won't buy it to sell it.There is no fund behind this, so there is no date by which somebody else has to be paid out.
We won't take a company apart to pay for it.No strip, no sale-leaseback of the building, no gutting the catalog to service debt.
We won't ask for a price first.Not in a first conversation. If you want to know where we would be, ask and we will tell you.
We won't pretend to be further along than we are.This would be the first company we buy, and you will hear that from us before you have to ask.
We won't pass your name around.If a conversation goes nowhere, it stays between us.

Why this

We want to own things that are still running in twenty years.

Our background is software built for the aviation industry, where almost nothing we made will outlast the decade. That is most of the reason for doing this.

It started with flying. You begin asking who actually makes the parts that have to work, and the answers are usually small companies nobody has heard of, run by someone who has been doing it for thirty years.

Get in touch

A call is fine, and so is a note that says not now.

219-798-2886

Will McComis
Shoreland Holdings
Northwest Indiana
If you would rather meet, we will fly out.