Two doors

For operators who already generate the raw material. Every day your business produces records that exist nowhere else and that nobody has normalized — the by-product of doing the work. You are sitting on the first layer of a data asset and have no particular reason to be good at building the rest of it.

What we bring

• Schema design. Deciding what the record is, before it accumulates in a shape that cannot be queried later.
• Normalization. The thirty small interpretation problems. This is the part that is tedious rather than hard, and it is the part that compounds.
• Productization. Turning a normalized record into something with a price on it, a delivery mechanism, and a reason to renew.
• The buyers. Knowing who pays for the answer, and what form they need it in.

What we look for

The same four conditions as anything else we build:

1. A recurring stream of records nobody else sees.
2. Governing rules that are public but scattered across jurisdictions.
3. A segment too small for a national vendor to bother with.
4. An administrative rather than market-set price.

You keep operating. Nothing about the day job changes.

For owners of data or services businesses. Being plain about what you would be dealing with matters more here than a pitch does.

SocioClimate is a small operator, not a fund. There is no blind pool behind this. There is no auction process, no forty-eight-hour letter of intent used as a negotiating device, and no associate who will hand the file to someone else after signing. You would talk to the person who will still be running the business afterwards.

What we buy

Businesses that produce a record as a by-product of operating — data, services, or software with a data exhaust — where the record is worth more than the current owner has been able to make it worth.

What happens after

We hold. The reason a small operator can pay a fair price for a business like this is that the record keeps accruing after the sale, and a fund with a horizon cannot underwrite that.