In this episode of the Investing by the Books podcast from Redeye, Evergreen Co-Founder and CEO Jeff Totten joins host Eddie Palmgren to discuss Built from Scratch, the story of how Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank grew Home Depot from nothing into a national company. Jeff traces his own path from a high school photography business to discovering Warren Buffett and the power of acquisition-led compounding, then to co-founding Evergreen in 2017 alongside Ramsey Sahyoun after a trip to the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting. Nine years and more than 160 acquisitions later, with roughly $1.5 billion in revenue, he reflects on why the permanent holding company structure, with no fund lifetime and no forced exit, was the right foundation for a business meant to compound forever.
The conversation draws out the parallels between Home Depot and Evergreen, starting with a shared commitment to decentralization that surprised Jeff in a book about a national brand. He talks through Evergreen’s three industry groves and explains why the holding company keeps capital allocation and M&A centralized while delegating nearly everything else to its operating companies and their leaders. He is candid about an early misstep, a first-year acquisition built on aggressive integration that forced the firm to pause and stabilize, and how that experience reinforced the decentralized model. Throughout, he returns to the metrics that matter to Evergreen, including recurring revenue growth, retention, and employee and customer NPS, and the culture the firm has built around empowerment, persistence, and what he calls rolling snowballs.
Jeff also gets into where Evergreen is headed, including the most internal capital allocation the firm has ever done as it funds AI-native bets, among them an entirely new company launching within Pine Services Group, the ERP industry grove. He shares lessons on talent as the catalyst for growth, the discipline required to pass on deals that do not meet the firm’s criteria, his thinking on leverage and the choice between private and public markets, and how he approaches succession and long-term identity for a company he hopes will outlast its founders by a century. The episode closes with a look at the business stories that have shaped his thinking, from Snowball and The Outsiders to Made in America.
Listen to the full episode below.