Evening Rock Capital

A Letter to Owners

If you're ready to step back from your business, I'd like to talk with you about its next chapter.

I'm Ned Mitchell, and I'm looking to buy one small business and steward its legacy of delivering incredible value for its customers.

I don't have a portfolio of companies or a five-year exit plan. I don't have a team of consultants waiting to show up and tell your people how to do their jobs. I'm one entrepreneur, with fifteen years of experience building and running businesses, empowering teams, and making quick decisions based on their long-term impact — and I'm ready to put all of that to work for a firm with a deep history and success track record.

If you've spent years building a business with integrity — the kind where customers stay because they trust you, and team members stay because they value their customer and each other — I'd welcome the chance to have a conversation. No pressure, no timeline, just a straightforward talk about what you've built and what matters to you about what comes next.

— Ned Mitchell, Founder

Experience

Fifteen years of building, investing, and leading teams.

What I bring to a business

Full P&L ownership and responsibility to deploy $150M+ in operating investment (an aggregation of decisions ranging from $10K to $10M)
Built and led a 30-person cross-functional team spanning four continents
Hands-on experience standing up and training local and regional B2B sales operations
"Land and expand" operations leadership by devising and implementing winning models in new geographies, new regulatory environments, and new customers/partners
Bottoms-up capital planning and resource allocation against multi-year growth horizons
Grass-roots executive and talent recruiting, without headhunters
Five years of deal evaluation, financial modeling, and risk-aware investment structuring
A management philosophy rooted in developing empowered individual and management decision-makers

Following business school, I spent nearly a decade at Amazon in senior operating roles. Most recently I led a new revenue initiative building commercial partnerships with major global brands. Before that, I built and ran a cross-functional department of 30 people across eight cities on four continents, with full P&L responsibility over $150M+ in investment. I've hired and managed teams from the ground up, built sales operations, developed capital plans against long-term growth horizons, sourced business development relationships, and made hundreds of investment decisions about where to deploy capital and when to pull back.

That taught me what a truly customer-obsessed organization looks like, and how to cultivate strong team members and an executive team who all know the right questions to ask and can work toward making good decisions when faced with adversity and ambiguity. Those lessons shape how I think about leadership, and they're what I intend to bring to running and scaling a small business.

Before attending the UCLA Anderson School of Management for business school, I spent five years in the finance world. As a middle-market private equity and mezzanine private credit investor in Los Angeles, I evaluated and structured transactions across more than a billion dollars of investments in healthcare, consumer, technology, and business services. Before that, I was an investment banking analyst based in New York covering a diverse range of financial services companies, from advisory firms to service businesses like insurance claims adjustors. Internships in oil & gas consulting and government & defense consulting during my college days gave me exposure to an even wider set of industries, particularly those that are highly regulated, and operationally complex.

MBA, UCLA Anderson School of Management

BA, History, Yale University

What I'm Looking For

What I've learned makes a business worth owning.

Over fifteen years of operating, investing in, and studying businesses across dozens of industries, I've developed a clear sense of what I find most compelling — and it has less to do with sector or size than with how a business is built to deliver incredible value for its customers.

I'm drawn to businesses that serve other businesses, because businesses have ongoing need for each other. That creates multi-year relationships rather than one-off transactions, and those relationships compound in ways that are hard to replicate and harder to disrupt.

I look for cultures that figured out how to focus on signals others missed — and used that focus to super-serve customers with specific, often niche needs. The businesses I admire most are the ones customers don't worry about much, but would really feel it if they weren't there. Their customers pay them precisely for the value they provide and the pain they help avoid.

I care a lot about the team. I want to see people who count on each other, who've been developed and trusted, and who are (just about) ready for the founder to step back because a real bench has been cultivated. And I value businesses that speak plainly — with their customers, their team, and their partners. No doublespeak, no surprises.

The specifics

Cash profits: $1M – $2M in annual pre-tax earnings
Revenue: $3M – $15M in annual revenue
Geography: Anywhere in the U.S. lower 48
Year-round demand: Your firm doesn't burn through cash because the leaves change color
Licensing: Your firm has licensing with its own succession plan to survive under new ownership
Clean books: Your tax filings don't commingle undocumented personal expenses with the business
Real estate: You don't have to own your property, and you can keep owning it if you do, but primary facilities can recommit to new long-term leases at fair market rates
Seller financing: You're open to a creative approach to seller financing that meets your cash flow and valuation expectations

What I'm not

I'm not a minority investor or a passive stakeholder. I'm not looking for distressed turnarounds. I'm looking for a healthy business with a strong team, where an engaged owner with operating experience and financial discipline can help protect what's been built and grow it into its next chapter.

For Investors

The kind of partners I'm looking for.

I'll be the majority owner and full-time operator, and will work with minority co-investors who are aligned with my leadership ethos and are prepared to deploy capital as well as their experience to strengthen this firm.

Time horizon

Long-term. Think ten years, with the ability to exit if the business is performing well and I choose to keep going rather than sell.

Experience that helps

You've been through this yourself — either as a self-funded searcher who acquired and exited, or as an owner-operator of a small business.

Right-sized commitment

You seek meaningful returns, but not to commit a meaningful portion of your net worth. This should be an investment you're excited about, not one that keeps you up at night.

Communication

You'd like to hear from your CEO informally quite often — weekly, early on — with periodic formal reporting once we've established a rhythm. I believe in transparency and want investors who value it.

How It Works

A straightforward process.

Selling a business is one of the biggest decisions you'll make. Here's what to expect.

Conversation

A confidential, no-obligation phone call. I'll ask questions, you'll ask questions, and we'll figure out together whether there's a fit worth exploring.

Evaluation

If there's something here, I'll sign an NDA and ask to take a closer look at the financials and operations — and you'll have every chance to evaluate me as a potential successor. If we align on topline valuation after this early look, it would be my preference to spend time together in-person to keep talking.

Partnership

A fair offer, transparent terms, and a certain timeline to close that is structured to protect you and your team with no surprises.