In this episode, Ben Hayes, Nick Baxter, and Austin Bockwinkel share how Freestone Insurance Group is building a nationally recognized insurance platform rooted in relationships and entrepreneurial drive. Ben reflects on his journey from professional golf to founding a full-service brokerage, and how an unplanned conversation with Shore Capital opened his eyes to what Freestone could become. The team discusses why they chose partnership over exit, how investing in talent and technology transformed their business, and what they look for in agency owners ready to join the platform. They talk about preserving the brands and cultures entrepreneurs have built, why the most exciting time to join is at the beginning, and how insurance remains a people-first industry where Freestone's future will be defined by the partners who choose to be part of the story.

Key Takeaways:

1. Entrepreneurial drive and trusted relationships form the foundation of durable growth in a people-first insurance industry.
2. Investing early in specialized expertise and operational infrastructure frees leaders to move from working in the business to building the business.
3. Choosing partnership over exit unlocks talent, technology, and strategic resources that accelerate scale without sacrificing culture or control.
4. The most compelling platforms preserve brand, legacy, and entrepreneurial identity while aligning incentives to create long-term shared value.

Chapters:

1. 00:00 - Introduction
2. 03:49 - A People-First Business
3. 06:10 - Investing in Talent and Infrastructure
4. 09:46 - Partnership Over Exit
5. 18:28 - Preserving Legacy and Driving Growth

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You'll also find other Microcap Moments episodes, alongside our series Everyday Heroes and Bigger. Stronger. Faster., highlighting the people and stories that make the microcap space unique.

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Blog: https://www.shorecp.university/blog

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This podcast is the property of Shore Capital Partners LLC. None of the content herein is investment advice, an offer of investment advisory services, or a recommendation or offer relating to any security. See the “Terms of Use” page on the Shore Capital website for other important information.

Welcome to Microcap Moments, a podcast from Shore Capital Partners that highlights the stories of founders, investors, and leaders who have taken on the challenge of transforming ideas and small companies into high growth organizations.

The journey of building and scaling a business takes one down many unexpected paths.

It's a journey where we learn from our mistakes fall down often, but have the entrepreneurial grit to pick ourselves up and persevere.

Within this series, we will share these stories of success and failure, of the challenges and the rewards faced by those who dare to dream big.

And through their lessons learned, we hope to inspire others who are on a similar journey of becoming, growing and leading.

In this episode, Ben Hayes, Nick Baxter.

And.

Austin Bockwinkel share how Freestone Insurance Group is rethinking what it means to build and scale an insurance platform.

Ben shares his unconventional path from professional golf to founder, and the team's realization that to grow and truly keep the customer at the center would require investing in both talent and technology in ways they weren't sure how to accomplish on their own.

They talk about how an unplanned conversation with Ryan Kelly of Shore Capital, led to a business and life-changing partnership, even if it wasn't necessarily a partnership they were looking for.

They discuss why insurance remains a people-driven industry, what kinds of partners they're looking for to grow their business, and what it takes to scale culture, great service, and an entrepreneurial spirit all at the same time.

Welcome, Ben, Nick and Austin.

Thanks for joining me today.

To get us started, will you just introduce yourself and say what you do at Freestone?

Maybe start with Nick, then Austin, and then Ben.

Okay, Nick Baxter.

I oversee our property and casualty commercial portion of the business, work closely with our sales team and service team to help deliver a best in class efficient insurance program for our clients, and have been with the firm since late 2020, early 2021 when we opened up, and it's been a wild ride.

How about you, Austin?

Hey, I'm Austin Bockwinkel, Chief Operating Officer of Freestone.

I also head up our M&A advisory practice.

Um, I've got a pretty broad view of our business and have my hands in, I think just about everything.

But ultimately at the end of the day, I'm focused on helping our teammates help our clients and very involved at the moment with client service.

Uh, really enjoying the role.

Hi, my name is Ben Hayes.

I'm the founder and CEO of Freestone Insurance Group based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

I'm proud to represent our employees and customers nationally and thrilled to be partnered with Shore Capital and excited to be here today.

Ben, will you just start by describing what Freestone does?

Sure.

Freestone is a full service consulting advisory and brokerage firm helping our corporate customers purchase and effectively execute sophisticated insurance strategies.

So give me an example, Ben, if I am a corporate customer, what does that mean to me?

How do I work with you?

Sure.

So all of our corporate customers are thinking critically about insurance and how it relates into their business.

And our job is really to assist in the coordination of procuring those products and then implementing and executing a successful strategy so our customers can focus on their core competency, which is their business.

And you started Freestone back in 2016.

Will you talk a little bit about maybe a background, but also why and how you got this started?

Sure, happy to.

Well, I'm a successful, failed professional golfer.

Golf's been a big part of my life, and originally from Phoenix, Arizona.

And the Cliff note version is I went to school in Los Angeles, played competitive golf in college, and then decided to give it a go professionally.

Realized very quickly I was not Tiger Woods, and decided to exit gracefully from the ranks of professional golf and entered the corporate working world.

Was blessed to have an opportunity to enter into the insurance business with a group that was based in Los Angeles through a relationship that I had, they were kind enough to give me a start.

And it was quite literally my, myself and my cell phone figuring out how to be successful in this space.

But, uh, it was humble beginnings and learned a lot along the way.

Help me understand from the world of golf to the world of insurance, what was it about the insurance market?

That made you as an entrepreneur or say that's where I want to go, or there's an opportunity there.

Talk to me a little bit about the market and what you saw.

You know, the insurance business is a people business.

It's all about relationships.

And from a very young age, I was blessed to be around adults and learned how to interact and build relationships with people from diverse backgrounds and different age groups.

And you know, that developed a skillset to me that I really enjoyed.

Getting to know people, learning about what they did, and that opened a lot of doors for me.

And so golf was kind of a natural segue into the insurance business in the sense that it's heavily about relationships.

And I've been very blessed to meet so many interesting people that have opened a lot of doors for me along the way.

And since you've started Freestone and Nick and Austin, you may have some perspective on this, how has the industry evolved or changed in that time?

So over the years we've watched the big box brokers expand their capabilities and resources and as we compete with them every day, it's forced us to improve and develop our own value proposition to our customers.

And you know, again, I think that's part of the genesis of why Shore Capital became really intriguing for Freestone.

And our capabilities and resources have allowed us to better serve our customers and go up market where more complex solutions are needed.

To add to that, I'd just suggest that the insurance industry in general is pretty antiquated and we view that as one of the most significant opportunities that we have going forward, much like many industries.

I think the pace of change from a technology perspective over the next five years is gonna be dramatic, but we feel like we're very well positioned, particularly with the resources from Shore and our focus to capture that opportunity and move faster because of our size and our interest in investing in the business in those areas.

So when you think about it being antiquated, and obviously I don't come from this market, but what does antiquated mean?

And just as an example, like something that y'all are approaching differently to kinda move the ball forward, you know, starting or have already delivering.

Sure, yeah.

A lot of the work that we do for our clients happens behind the scenes and interfacing directly with insurance companies and in our chair, negotiating with them, interfacing with them.

Their processes are very antiquated.

So there's just a lot of manual paper pushing I would call it, and work that needs to happen, that is not necessarily accretive to the ultimate outcome.

And so we're looking at ways to be more efficient with our adoption of technology, just to eliminate sort of the menial work, have everybody practice at the top of their license, and ultimately the answer is spend more time consulting and advising, and less time processing to get the job done.

So Ben, I wanna come back to you, you mentioned the partnership with Shore Capital as a founder, what was it that made you start thinking about bringing on a capital partner, and what did that process look like for you?

One, what was it that you saw in your business or in the market, and maybe a little bit what you thought a partner could bring that otherwise you weren't sure you could accomplish.

Truth be told, we were not looking to really partner with anybody.

We didn't know what we didn't know.

As we continued to run the business daily, we were having success year over year from a growth perspective.

But I think, you know, what started to become clear to me was the needs of our customers were evolving.

And as our business continued to grow and we were having more conversations with customers, what I'll term up market, which is again, larger employers with more sophisticated needs and you know, maybe more complex risk solutions required.

We started bumping up against some resources that we were required to have internally that we didn't have.

And you know, just to strategize on how to evolve our business to meet the needs of our customers 'cause we had high growth aspirations.

We wanted to continue to, you know, build Freestone in what we thought it was capable of.

And you know, that was when I had the opportunity to meet Ryan Kelly organically.

We were not as part of a marketing process, we had not really considered any other alternative investors or other relationships in that regard.

We just organically had a conversation and as we started to talk to Ryan about how he would view the future of what Freestone could look like, it became very clear to me that, you know, the resources that Shore could provide the expertise, the access to knowledge and talent.

To me, it made all the sense in the world for where Freestone was at at the time.

Yeah.

I love that.

'cause it wasn't that you were actively looking, but something that the conversation with Ryan said sort of opened up a different vision.

Do you remember what that was that made you go, oh, well I hadn't thought about our business going there or going at that speed, or do you remember what that was?

Yeah, I mean, I think it was mostly around talent.

You know, he said, well, how do you think about this?

How do you think about that?

And what it really was was communicating how we could pull forward some of these expenses into today's environment and hire key people that would help accelerate the growth of our business.

Because what ended up happening for me as the CEO of Freestone 1.0, you know, I was trying to do the job of, you know, a number of different executive roles.

And it just, at the end of the day, it was an inch deep and a mile wide and really ineffective at any of them.

And so for us to be able to pull forward those expenses and recruit incredible people to help lead the business has just made all the difference.

And once that sort of conversation started to open up with Ryan, share a little bit about your own critical process.

You weren't looking for a financial partner, so it's not like you had a scorecard at that point.

What were the things that you were exploring or trying to learn once that conversation kind of piqued your interest as to how you might move forward and why did Shore end up being the right partner?

Yeah, sure.

So, you know, we were blessed to have a lot of interest from quote unquote strategic buyers, which are, you know, now our competitors and, you know, the path forward that they would showcase for us as part of their enterprise, which, you know, usually was a regional vice president role of the Southwest and employee benefits.

And we would be attaching ourselves to what we term a fully built platform or a very mature platform, and they would tout very high valuations.

And, you know, that felt to me a lot like an exit.

It didn't really feel like we were investing in our company the right way to create growth.

And I'll always be grateful for the introduction to Ryan Kelly because when he flew down to Arizona, we were able to have our conversation, our first conversation, we really mapped what the future of Freestone looked like, and Freestone could be the platform investment.

And they're so knowledgeable in our industry already and have all these adjacent assets that Freestone gets to be the beneficiary of.

It really became a much more attractive partnership because we weren't ready to exit.

We wanted to double down, we wanted to grow, we wanted to see what Freestone was capable of, and we think it's capable of something very special.

I love that distinction in the conversation between it feeling like an exit and feeling like an investment to the next best version of Freestone.

Nick, you were there all along.

I'm just curious from your perspective, when this conversation started, what were you thinking?

Did you have concerns about private equity and what that meant, or what did you know about private equity?

Just any thoughts as you were next to Ben in all of this process?

Yeah, well, I would also add to Ben's point that while we weren't thinking about partnering with anyone.

I think we knew we did not wanna do the route he was just referencing like the, you know, basically exit exiting to a big box broker.

We knew that was not what we wanted to do, but we were having pretty regular conversations about we need to do something, whether that's just internal.

So I think the timing of it was pretty perfect.

I mean, we were definitely at like a bit of an inflection point of we gotta start doing things a little differently or we're just gonna kind of chug along, which we were enjoying, but.

What was that, from your perspective, what was it that you saw that was like, we're doing great, we've got a great business, but we need to do something differently?

Walk through that mindset or the things that were on your mind at that point.

I mean, I think it was kind of a, you know, it's kind of cliche statement, but we were constantly working like in the business, you know, day in and day out, putting out a fire or the big picture ideas were just kind of constantly being pushed, you know, to Friday.

To next Friday to next Friday, and we would get there.

But I think that we knew that we needed some sort of like gasoline poured on the fire and... Yeah, I think the timing was just perfect.

It sounds like that resonates with what Ryan shared about the people and the capacity, right?

The, the dovetailing of like, we've gotta have more people so we can work on the business.

A hundred percent.

And the ability to invest in talent early in the platform.

No question.

Yeah.

I would also add that even we had these ideas, we thought we knew what we needed to do to invest in the business, but you know, if we didn't even have access to the type of people that Shore Capital's given us access to, allowed us to reach.

Not only do we have access to 'em, they're excited about being a part of Freestone and what the future looks like for Freestone, and that really has been a huge differentiator for us.

Nick, I do wanna come back.

Did you have concerns about what this would mean for you or the business or.

Sure, I mean, I think I knew like high level the term private equity and knew about private equity and probably had a bit of a, not negative opinion, but not like overly optimistic.

And you know, Ben just mentioned the people business aspect of our business and that's also, that's not just true on the outwardly facing to our customers, but internally.

And we had spent a lot of time building what we believed to be a great culture of people and fun.

And I was concerned that maybe we were letting go of that potentially and putting like unnecessary pressure on our people.

And so I had that concern for Shore.

But none of that has come to fruition at all.

Yeah.

I think our people actually see us doubling down in a different way and know that we're really in it.

And I think it's elevated the culture post our partnership with Shore.

That's why I talk to founders and teams all the time about having a conversation about private equity and the story of partnering with Shore to exactly what we're talking about versus what they're gonna find if you just leave them to Google what is private equity?

Because that's a good way to get everybody scared.

Sure.

And it's quite opposite of Shore's approach to partnering with our founders.

Yeah.

And I did the Googling, you know I was, I was.

Yeah.

And you got more scared, right?

A hundred percent.

But I mean, it's truly like elevated us as people, but our business in general.

I'd love to hear, and any of you guys can chime in on this, but I'd love to hear as the process unfolded, how you did talk to the rest of the team about this to ensure that they saw the opportunity and could get excited and weren't getting lost and what article they read about private equity or otherwise.

How did y'all talk to your team?

I think what's really interesting is we did a pretty good job of communicating with our key stakeholders and key employees throughout the process.

Even doing that, there was still some water cooler talk about.

Sure.

Hey Ben, and Jake, and Nick have sold the business and we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Hold on.

We didn't sell the business.

We are taking on a strategic partner to help grow the business.

We're actually more invested in the business now today than we were prior.

And you know, that dynamic has really.

Because we were able to communicate that we were staying, you know, we're obviously continuing on with the business, gonna continue to run the business.

I'm still personally the largest shareholder has really made a big difference.

And the other thing that I'll tell you, we've been able to compensate our key employees with equity and put them on our cap table.

That, and now they've top to bottom.

The accountability, the sense of pride and ownership and Freestone has really changed the way we've been able to run our business every day.

Yeah, and I think the proof's in the pudding, just like.

I might've had some concerns.

I think it's valid that our people may have too, and I think they've seen the commitment that we have and just like we didn't want to exit, it's clear that nobody was exiting.

I mean, we are truly doubled down and it feels like that is a part of the culture now.

Yeah, for sure.

It's also important to recognize that that's not a one-time communication.

So one of the strategic initiatives that we've pulled forward this year is to have a monthly town hall meeting with our employees and understanding that we've very purposefully structured, aligned incentives across the board, communicating with them more regularly about the condition of the business.

The investments that are coming in where we expect to be in the next six months.

Having everybody totally aligned on the strategic direction of the business has really helped and we found that that provides clarity and comfort when perhaps there there wouldn't be with less communication.

So ongoing discussion on that front's really important.

Yeah, for sure.

Well, and then follow up on that, Austin, you're a newer member to the team.

What made you join and, and what made this the right opportunity for you?

It's one thing for these guys to have already be in the business and thinking about growing it and having these relationships with the team and so forth.

What about you?

What made this right for you?

So, you know, for a little bit of additional background, I've been in the insurance brokerage business for my entire career.

Got very fortunate to work with some tremendous people over the last, call it 15 years I've seen and worked at very large brokers, very small brokers, and figured out.

What I thought would be, you know, kind of the right way to build and scale and, and run a brokerage business.

So when I had the great pleasure of meeting Ben and Nick and several other members of the Freestone team, it was clear that we shared that vision and so alignment from an executive leadership perspective within our company, but also with our strategic partner.

Sure was first and foremost, right?

So, hey, where do we want to go?

And maybe more importantly, how are we going to get there together?

Was really kinda what made it for me.

I mean, these two individuals next to me are two of the most tremendous humans that I've ever worked with.

And you know, at the end of the day, this is a dream gig for me.

So you talk about how excited I am to be or could not be more excited.

Of interest as well, Shore Capital is actually, uh, a customer of mine for about 10 years, and so beyond alignment again with the Freestone team, it's really intimately knowing Shore and their flavor or variety of private equity, the way that they're investing in and building businesses versus just financially engineering them to an.

Was the difference maker, right?

I wanted to understand intimately what was that secret sauce, right.

I've hopefully got a long career in front of me, and to be able to have this opportunity with this team, the collective team is just super exciting.

So you had kind of had the opportunity to watch some Shore portfolio companies over a whole period and sort of what's happening there kind of.

Exactly.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tremendous opportunity to learn and grow and be a part of something special.

You know, we talk internally about not just being successful, but also being significant.

Yeah, and that's a really powerful word.

When you think about your experience with other brokers, I'm curious in coming in and having the chance to help build the next version of Freestone, what are some things that you saw in the industry that you know you want to mirror or expand upon versus some things perhaps that you're like.

That's the way the industry does it.

But if I have a chance to build something with these guys, I wanna do this differently.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a lot to unpack there.

Right.

And again, have that set of sets of experiences that have range from, you know, working at the second largest broker in the world where I started my career, to working at a broker that's actually very small on the other side of the scale and our investment thesis is really centered around finding the white space in the middle, classic barbell dynamics in this industry.

And so, you know, what you find at the top end, which is great and we wanna emulate, is highly specialized, right?

Both from a talent perspective, an industry focused perspective, resource perspective.

So we want to be specialized and we want to create niches that are attractive, that we can execute on.

On the smaller end of the barbell, there's an intense focus on always doing right by the customer, always having the customer first, providing more consultation and advisory rather than just transacting, actually building relationships with people.

And we've talked about it a lot already, but this is absolutely a people first business.

So for us it's about building to the sweet spot, which is right in the middle of both of those at the end of the day, where we can have world class resources, talent.

Specialization, but do business the right way for our customers, which is on a personal level with the right people and the right teams, always having the best folks, you know, on first base for our clients.

So most Shore companies grow, at least in part through acquisition, and I know you all are looking for acquisitions.

Will you talk a little bit about where you are today in terms of the platform and the number of partners, but also what you're looking for for that next partner at this stage of the business?

What does a good partner look like?

But give us a little bit of a sense of who's in the room today, so to speak.

Yeah, sure.

But then who should be next in the room?

So we've been really pleased with the amount of conversations we've been able to have with agency owners and operators and founders that are looking to have the type of discussion that we were looking to have about a year ago.

Some organic, and some have been led to us just through our market relationships and you know, we've been very blessed to have done one acquisition.

We're about seven months into our hold, which is hard to believe.

But we've done one acquisition, which is a property casualty firm based in Scottsdale, Arizona.

We knew the management team and they liked our story, and it was made a lot of sense to bring the businesses together.

That's been successfully integrated and it's going very well.

We have a couple of LOIs out in the market today with people that we've been able to build relationships with.

One on the property casualty side of the business and one on the employee benefits side of the business.

And you know, I think the common theme is, you know, similar to what we were experiencing as founders and operators prior to our transaction with Shore was what's next for the business?

And I like to say that we're the most attractive growth vehicle in the marketplace because we're early stage, because we're just coming outta the gates.

But we're also having success organically growing.

I mean, our partnership with Shore and the speed at which we're growing has been really exciting.

I think the marketplace has reacted very well to the partnership and you know, the Freestone as an entity.

The vintage of Freestone was poised to grow organically alongside our inorganic growth efforts.

And so I think that story is really resonating with the owners and operators that we're blessed to have gotten to know thus far.

And what does it look like?

You know, again, we're just trying to find fantastic people that are passionate about their business.

Not necessarily looking to exit, but maybe looking to diversify out of maybe their equity position and their current business.

But really, you know, there's a financial component for Shore, and we think that makes sense to address that, and we definitely want to address that.

People have earned the right to have that conversation, but also what does the future look like?

We wanna make sure that whatever you invest in Freestone going forward is an extremely attractive investment.

It's gonna allow you to grow your business.

Yeah, I think I would just agree with it.

The right people, the perfect like match is somebody that's at a position just like we were, you know, sitting there going, we need to do something, but we don't want to exit.

And I think that there's plenty of people out there in that position.

Yeah, we use the word partner a lot, but I think the way you describe that is why we use the word partner is that you're not looking to be someone's retirement plan immediately.

Right.

Long-term financial success and upside of being a part of the platform is all there.

But like yourselves, you're looking for people who still have a passion for the market and still see opportunity to grow, have subject matter expertise in their particular domain or set of products or otherwise, that that's what's gonna make the match.

Yeah, I mean, again, what's really resonated with these conversations we're having with owners and operators is, boy, I used to be able to grow my business and work on these strategic initiatives, and I used to be able to be out there selling.

That's what I love to do is to create opportunity for my company, but I've been dragged into all of these administrative issues or tasks or responsibilities, and I'm just not at my highest and best use.

And our goal is to say, okay, we're gonna give you the resources through our partnership to be able to go back to what you enjoy doing and be able to be strategic about your business.

Plus, we're gonna give you some ideas on how to do that because our cadre of resources is fairly broad, and so we think we can have better discussions, more effective discussions.

How can we leverage technology?

How can we pull forward that technology advancement?

Everybody in our industry is trying to think about, all right, well what's gonna happen here?

And while we don't have a crystal ball, we do have a lot of resources that are thinking critically on this topic for us, and that's really been a difference maker for us.

Austin, I wanna ask you a question as the person in the room who sort of joined this story, and then you guys can chime in.

Why on the flip side of this conversation, should someone want to join Freestone at this point?

What's the upside?

Aside from we, we will assume financial returns are certainly part of the story, but if I've built my business, it's my baby.

I'm passionate about it.

I love my team.

I've got a great business.

Why should I think about joining this platform?

Yeah.

We'll help you get back to doing what you do best, which is grow and grow organically through the resources that we're providing.

That's where the fun is, right?

Like this can be one of the most enjoyable jobs and industries that you can possibly work in, but it is mired by inefficiency, procedural issues, a lot of regulation, right?

And we get to take all of that off your plate and help enable organic growth that is not masked by rate increases like actual real organic growth and gets you back on the street doing what you love to do, being with your people, and ultimately I think providing better results for your clients through the resources that we can provide.

Nick or Ben, anything else you'd add?

So I think what's unique about us is we don't expect you to sunset the brand that you've built, all the equity that you've built over the years because you're in that position.

We wanna celebrate the fact that you're an entrepreneur and we want that to live on.

What we hope to do is empower you.

To be a part of our platform to continue your entrepreneurial drive and continue to be creative on how you want to grow the business, and we wanna support that process.

So in addition to being like you guys and being entrepreneurial and having built a great brand and still being engaged in the growth of their business, I have to believe that somebody wanting to partner early with Freestone has the opportunity to shape the business differently than later down the line.

Is that fair?

So, you know, I like to say one of the things that I've communicated in a lot of our discussions is I do think Freestone is the most interesting growth vehicle in the marketplace, and that's for a number of reasons.

Obviously, we think the economic value creation is very interesting.

We think that should definitely be a part of the story.

However, when we were going through this and making this decision, we did not want to quote unquote exit.

You know, the idea of being the regional vice president or plugging into a fully built platform, really was not overly interesting.

What was interesting was being part of, you know, the value creation and driving the directional nature of where Freestone 2.0 could go.

And we think it's really interesting for agency owners and operators today to be a part of that story.

And there's no doubt that there, and we've seen this time and again, that there's plenty of conversations happening with the fully built big box platforms.

No question you can exit in any direction, but I don't know any regional vice presidents that shaped the future of a business, and that's who we're looking for.

People that want to make a difference.

As you think about that, I mean, there's something that we see a lot across Shore by the nature of investing in microcap businesses.

You mentioned the brand.

How should I be thinking about Legacy?

Does joining a platform like this sort of take away that legacy of the brand that I've built, of the team that I've built as an entrepreneur, the people I serve?

How do you all think about the legacy of your partners and potential partners?

I mean, I think it takes a lot of work to build a brand in our business and we don't want to disrupt that.

Our overall like thought process on that is we just want to help your business catapult and take the things off your plate that you really don't enjoy doing.

To Austin's point, get back in the streets and grow the business.

And that does not mean that you give up your name, you give up your culture.

That stuff's important, and your clients buy from that.

So it's important to maintain that.

You address the question of legacy through the lens of your teammates, right?

As an owner of a business, I would say that.

When we're having conversations with founders, that comes up 100% of the time.

Hey, what does this mean for my people?

They've been with me for 20 years, they've been with me for 30 years.

The answer to that's really simple through the growth that we're all experiencing and that we'll experience together, incredible opportunities come outta that, right?

Learning, development, training, promotions, financial outcomes that are miles beyond what would you know happen in a vacuum if a transaction like this didn't happen?

And so.

When I think about legacy, it's about how am I taking care of my people at the end of the day, making their lives better?

And I think we provide a really great mechanism for doing that.

So Ben, just as a follow up, and Nick from your perspective as well, as you think about your partnership with Shore and that whole process, if you could go back and do that again, what did you learn or what would you have done differently that maybe you're taking forward in your partnerships as part of Freestone?

Yeah, one thing I always liked to communicate.

We were very blessed to have great representation, so we felt very, very confident in the terms of the agreement and the relationship and the back and forth that we were having with Shore.

I'd like to give Shore some credit through that process, they always did exactly what they said they were gonna do, and we were able to have very open, very transparent, very direct dialogue about what the partnership would look like.

If I could go back and change one thing, I would maybe speed up the process a little bit because, you know, we were very excited about the partnership, but I think we could have maybe accelerated some of the synergies that were gonna take place post-close in advance of closing 'cause we had made the decision that we were gonna move forward and there were some Ts and Cs that we had to work through, but that was actually a pleasant process.

Nobody's trying to win in those arrangements.

It's about they were always trying to give us a fair price for what we had built.

And then, you know, we had thought very critically about what that would look like pre LOI.

So the LOI was a pretty advanced document that set some very clear expectations and then we felt very confident in our representation and we started to really model out what the partnership was gonna look like post-close.

Um, so we were able to hit the ground running, but I would've maybe spent a little more time on what the post-close process was going to look like and what we were gonna do right outta the gates.

You know, we've mentioned it before, we weren't necessarily looking for a partner.

So when it came time to actually start providing, you know, due diligence documents, maybe we were a little bit behind in that.

Uh, you don't know what you don't know necessarily.

And honestly, there was moments where I thought, if we don't do this deal, this has been a good exercise for us to look inward on our business anyway.

But I would've liked to speed that up too.

So, Ben, you're seven months into the hold period.

We typically think about hold periods in Shore as a five year or so, hold period.

Help anybody listening who's running a great business just like you were.

Imagine the future that you now see out five years that perhaps you couldn't even have imagined seven, eight months ago.

Yeah, sure.

I can't even believe we're in the position that we're in because we've had to move the goalposts on what success looks like.

I think the impact of best in class practices has allowed us to scale our business and you know, the inclusion of incredible people thinking critically about our business on a daily basis has just changed the way we operate.

It changes the experience for our customers, changes the way we think about success, and I think success ultimately now looks like, you know, if we can build a nationally recognized brand that is known for delivering an incredible experience to its customers.

And it's come together by partnering with incredible agency owners and operators that have the same ethos that we do, that maintain their entrepreneurial drive.

And want to continue to grow their business.

I think that's really exciting and it's gonna allow us to achieve our goals.

Yeah, and just to add to that, our business, to Ben's point, has changed drastically in the last seven, eight months or whatever it's been.

And the people we've added, the culture we've maintained and I think added to, we continually get people reaching out to us, both sales service people, administrative people, wanting to be a part of the group.

And I envision in five years that's gonna continue and we're gonna be a place where the best and brightest talent in our industry want to be a part of and that's a really exciting thing.

We went to, um, Shore Capital event last year and Justin was speaking and he made the comment that Shore's goal is to make the outcome that this would be the best professional decision that I ever made.

And I can say in seven months, it is the best professional decision I've ever made.

Shore has changed my life personally, and it's changed the directional nature of Freestone in everybody's life inside of Freestone.

So we're very proud of that.

If you enjoyed this episode, check out our other Microcap Moments episodes at www.shorecp.university/podcasts or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Here you will also find our Bigger.

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and Everyday Heroes series.

Each highlighting the people and stories that make investing in the lower middle market unique.

This podcast was produced by Shore Capital Partners and recorded in the Andrew Malone podcast studio with story and narration by Anderson Williams.

Recording by Austin Johnson.

Editing by Reel Audiobooks.

Sound design, mixing, and mastering by Mark Galup of Reel Audiobooks.

Special thanks to Ben Hayes, Nick Baxter, and Austin Bockwinkel.

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