I grew up around businesses before I knew what to call them. I was raised in Cincinnati by a serial entrepreneur, and the companies around me were a CPA firm, real estate companies, a roofing company and a collector car dealership. On paper they had little in common. What they shared was an owner who showed up, knew the numbers and did not quit. I learned one rule early, and I still believe it: never quitting gives you an advantage over 99% of the people.
Dark Ice Capital is the firm Alexandra Pohl and I started to put that rule, and a few others we learned the hard way, into a structure that can hold more than one business at a time. This note is about why.
Where I learned the job
I started as a project manager on job sites across the eastern United States. A job site is an honest place. Concrete cures or it does not. A schedule holds or it slips, and when it slips, everyone can see it. The questions I asked then are the questions I still ask: can it be built on time and on budget, will the market pay for it, and what breaks first?
By 2005 I was Managing Partner of Trustpoint Financial’s residential real estate funds, and I went on to found Tetra Homes in single-family and Majorwave in multifamily. We bought whole neighborhoods and apartment communities and repositioned them into places people wanted to live. Then 2008 arrived. We kept building, bought while others sold, gave investors the hard truth early and kept our team together.
That stretch taught me more than any good year did. The businesses that came through it were not the ones with the best story going in. They were the ones whose owners knew exactly where they stood every month and acted on it before the market forced them to.
What Alexandra brought
Alexandra reached the same conclusion from a different direction. She was raised in a real estate family, then spent more than seven years applying lean and Toyota Production System methods to complex, multi-site operations at Toyota and Danfoss, followed by more than eight years in senior U.S. federal leadership on regulatory and infrastructure matters. I learned discipline on job sites. She learned it on production lines and in programs where a missed standard had public consequences.
When we compared notes, we kept landing on the same point. Most businesses that struggle do not lack capital. They struggle because nobody is running them to a standard, the numbers arrive late or arrive dressed up, and the plan lives in one person’s head.
We do not buy assets. We buy businesses we know how to run better.
Alexandra Pohl, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Why a firm, and why eight companies
Dark Ice Capital is a private capital firm headquartered in Dallas, Texas, with six offices. It owns eight platform companies outright: Aukeo in luxury hospitality and private travel; Cotra in real estate development and operation; ERTH Resource Group in natural resources, energy, water and air; Fortuneo in real asset credit, specialty finance and insurance; Gr3ySpace in consumer and operating services; PitcHouse in media studios in commercial real estate; Slate Blue Capital in multi-strategy asset management and capital markets; and UpManagement in infrastructure, real assets and specialty capital.
That is a wide spread, and people ask why we did not pick one sector. The answer is that these sectors share more than they appear to. Buildings, land, hotels, aircraft, networks and loans all reward the owner who runs them well, every day, for years. They all depend on licenses, approvals and controls being kept in good order. And they all get better when the people running them can see the same numbers, in the same form, at the same time.
One company can build those habits. Eight companies held to one standard can do something more: problems surface early, and what works in one company can travel to the next. That is why Dark Ice Capital exists as one firm rather than as eight separate owners.
What owning and operating means to us
“Owner-operator” gets used loosely, so here is what we mean by it.
We own each company outright and run it for the long term. Each keeps its own name, its brand, its customers and its culture. The people who stay in an Aukeo residence or rent from Cotra are customers of Aukeo and Cotra, and that is how it should be.
Every investment has a written plan and a 100-day plan before capital goes in. The plan is written down so that it can be checked, by us and by the people inside the company.
Every company runs on one operating standard, one reporting cadence and one set of controls: written policies for valuation, conflicts, expenses, information security and anti-corruption, under one compliance program. Finance, compliance, legal, technology and investor services are shared across all eight companies under written agreements, so each management team can spend its time on its own customers.
Every month, each company reports the same core numbers to our investment committee, in the same week, with nothing smoothed. Alexandra chairs that committee and I am its Co-Chair. My part is the operating side: bringing each company under one set of controls, one shared services model and one plan to build, acquire and operate. I still walk the sites and meet the operators. The job-site questions have not changed.
Buy it right, build it right, run it right. Everything else follows.
William Pohl III, Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer
What we are not
We are a new firm, and I want to be plain about what that means. Dark Ice Capital has no track record as a firm. I began managing investment funds in 2005, but the results of the funds I ran before are not shown here, and nothing I have done before is a promise about what Dark Ice Capital will do. The fund programs of our companies are in formation. None has been sized, formed or offered, and none will be offered until our SEC investment adviser registration is effective. Several of our companies own or plan licensed businesses, and a change of their control may need regulatory approval first.
We would rather say all of that up front than have anyone discover it later. Candor is part of the standard, not a disclaimer attached to it.
Who these notes are for
These notes are for the people who will judge us by what we do: owners and families deciding what comes next for a business they built, the managers and employees inside our companies, the bankers and advisers who bring us opportunities, and the partners we work beside in each of our sectors.
We will use this space to explain how we work, in plain language: how we look at a business, what we ask of the people who run ours, and what an owner should expect from any buyer, including us. We will publish when there is something worth saying, and company news will appear only with each company’s approval.
If you own a business in one of our sectors, we would like to hear about it. We answer on fit within ten business days, and you will get a straight answer either way.
This note is for information only and is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or fund interest, or legal, tax or investment advice.