Hey folks!
Building a holding company can feel daunting. But it helps to know they come in all shapes and sizes.
So I’m trying something a little different — we’ve talked to a handful of different holdco builders about where they got their start, their challenges, and their biggest breakthroughs along the way.
(Plus, it’s a great way to get you in the mood for HoldCo Conference 2025!)
Today’s interview: Chase Murdock
Chase is focused on building local businesses in Salt Lake City, Utah. He and his cofounder started Decada Group without any outside investment… off the back of a luxury clothing shop.
Let’s do it!
How did you get started on your holdco journey?
For the first 10 years of my career, I was chasing moonshots. Some successful, most not.
I started to feel like I was on this treadmill built around the arrival fallacy — “We'll run a good company once we raise that round” or “We’ll have good work-life balance.” We were justifying these long hours and sacrificing a lot to try to go either IPO or get acquired.
I went from one project to the next in the hopes of a big outcome, until I got this naive, brilliant idea.
Me and my best friend Adam would start a small lifestyle business, and siphon off a little bit of cash from that so that we could pursue moonshot ideas and delay having to raise capital.
So we started this little teeny custom clothing shop in downtown Salt Lake City. 18 months later, we were doing a million bucks a year topline, and we were profitable every single month.
We realized that when you're not building something to flip or sell, but you're building something to last… it just feels different.
Where did you go from there?
We fell in love with building that company. Every year got more fun, our team got better, our product got better, and we were generating more free cash flow.
Our plan was to open more locations across the US, but then COVID hit.
We were curious whether we could apply our existing playbook to another company in a different industry. So we acquired a fine art studio called Workshop SLC. And we 4 or 5x’ed in the first year, then 4 or 5x’ed it again in the second year.
We got the sense that we were on to something.
What challenges did you face early on?
For the first three or four years, I went without pay to build the holdco moonlight style. Adam was making less than he had probably made in his entire career. And it was long hours and hard work.
By the first year of our second company, we were wondering if we had made the biggest mistake of our lives. We were wondering if this business was going to actually kill us.
Shouldn't we just be reinvesting into the first company? It felt like throwing good money after bad. And this time around, it wasn't our investors’ cash. It was our cash.
But we felt like it was worth doing. And finally the second business turned around.
Today it’s the highest margin business in our portfolio, at 25 to 30%.
You’ve built your business with a partner. Why do it together instead of on your own?
Adam and I are best friends. We've known each other for almost 15 years. And we definitely round each other out in personality and skill set.
The most important thing is, we both agree on the north star of Decada Group: to build a day-to-day we don't want to retire from (instead of a 30% ARR). I think that that's a big part of what allows our partnership to work.
We want to work on businesses that are fun. And because we don’t raise outside capital, it allows us to look at everything that we do with a very different lens.
It’s not a surf shack on the beach, but we kind of treat it like it’s a lifestyle business. We make a lot of decisions about enjoying our day-to-day.
Tell me about the decision not to raise capital. Was that an easy call?
We've always been willing to sacrifice high growth in exchange for independence.
There are moments when it's tough. Sometimes it feels like there's a devil and an angel on either shoulder, and the devil is saying, "Man, look at that deal. You could take that down if you went and raised a little capital." And instead, we choose to pass.
But a lot of things shift in a company when you add that pressure of a return on capital, and we didn't want that.
We don't have an LP breathing down our necks or expecting a return that may force us to operate the day-to-day differently than we do today. So it's allowed us to do some meaningfully different things.
And when it’s tough, we book a two-week vacation. By the end of that, we're back to feeling centered and focused on our vision.
You’re pretty focused on Salt Lake City. Why is that?
We live here. It's a great place to do business. And frankly, we don't want to spend our careers on planes.
There's something viscerally fulfilling when you drive around a city and you can see where our construction company built that, or the fact that the mayor is a customer of three of our businesses.
It comes with tradeoffs — if there's a killer deal just over the mountain range in Denver, we're not going to look at it, despite that devil on our shoulder.
Do you ever get back into the operator’s seat?
Yeah. Every once in a while, we have a key operator depart. That means we pack our bags and get back to work.
We’ve never called ourselves investors. We’re entrepreneurs and operators, so it's pretty natural for us to step back in.
Last year, I had to act as an interim co-CEO for six or seven months. And while it was a different day-to-day than I enjoy most of the time, it was genuinely fun to get back into the trenches.
How has building a holdco changed your daily life?
I read once that the higher you get in your career, the less your hard skills matter and the more understanding people and psychology comes into play. So it's been really fulfilling to spend time understanding how to motivate and encourage people to bring their best selves to work.
We get to play this really privileged role, which is a shoulder to cry on, or the first call in the moment of crisis, or a voice of wisdom during moments that are hectic at the operating company level.
On the lifestyle side, you don't have a very strong holding company if you can't take a break. So much of what we're doing is having to build systems that work without us.
How do you think about your legacy?
For now, we want to be the buyer of choice for Salt Lake City business owners who care about their legacy.
When we buy a business, our job as its new owners is to honor the founding vision and then usher it forward into a second chapter that's just as exciting as its first.
What advice would you give someone early in their journey?
Pay close attention to whether you truly love the day-to-day of what you're doing.
I see a lot of people enter this space because they see a strong return on capital opportunity. And that can work. But there's a very big difference between the entrepreneurs who care about the craft of company building versus the entrepreneurs who are building for the sake of a return.
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Thank you, Chase!
And thank you for reading. That’s it for today’s interview.
Do you think you’d be a fit for the holdco lifestyle? Not sure how to get started?
Consider coming to HoldCo Conference 2025. You can get a crash course in all things holdco, learn a ton, and have a great time doing it.
Have a great week!
Michael
