At this small buyout firm, talking about AI for cost-cutting is off-limits

• Much of the AI-discussion, both hopes and fears, centers on efficiency and cost-cutting.
• At buyout firm Tide Rock, there’s a “mandate” to not use AI resources to cut costs, says its CEO.
• Ryan Peddycord walked Business Insider through how the firm uses AI to grow businesses.

Most fears and hopes surrounding AI center on its ability to save on labor costs. Whether it’s Jamie Dimon predicting a three-and-a-half-day workweek, the chorus of CEOs saying that AI will help its workers get more done, or the research predicting potentially catastrophic white-collar job cuts, the focus is on efficiency.

But at one investing firm, cost-cutting is practically a forbidden word.

“The mandate across the company is don’t talk about using our resources in AI or tech to cut costs or create efficiencies,” Tide Rock CEO Ryan Peddycord told Business Insider.

The firm has had AI engineers for two years, but they’re aimed at growing business, not cutting, said Peddycord.

The San Diego and New York-based firm, which invests in smaller businesses than your typical private-equity giants, does not use debt to finance its acquisitions. It manages $1 billion, including its current investments and dry powder. It has done over 50 acquisitions, with growth, not just financial engineering, as its goal.

“Our foundation is, and our principle is, that we are focused on being growth engines for these businesses, and that’s where we want to focus our resources,” Peddycord said.

Peddycord spoke to Business Insider about how the firm’s use of AI fits into its business model and gave some real-world examples of where it has made an impact.

Tide Rock’s model

The company buys founder-run businesses when founders have “a catalyst to change,” like their own looming retirement or an illness in their family, which means they’re much more protective of the asset they’re selling than your typical financial investor.

They then focus on growing those companies, which means Tide Rock hires chief marketing officers and chief revenue officers “who know how to run businesses” instead of your typical private equity partners, Peddycord said.

The firm’s companies have seen organic revenue growth of 24% a year since Tide Rock was launched 13 years ago, said Peddycord. (He also said the firm has only lost money on one deal over that time period.)

They’re looking for a way to monetize what they built over time, but really just as important to them is for their brand and their legacy and their employees to be able to kind of continue on without them,” Peddycord said.

For founders like this, the story of growth is an essential reason they’d choose to sell to Tide Rock. As such, any discussion of using AI to cut employees or costs is anathema to their sales pitch, whereas AI for growth is a selling point.

AI is becoming an integral part of the firm’s strategy, but they’ve been doing this for years before the advent of LLMs some operational best practices in a library of over 100 videos and 500 pages of documentation.

“A CEO of a portfolio company has access to certain information, a controller has access to a different set of information, a VP of sales has access to information,” Peddycord said.

AI tools have become another operational best practice that the firm shares across the companies it manages, which it tracks in a library of 100 videos and 500 pages of documentation.

The firm also has other centralized resources in-house, “as a bridge” to get the businesses to a place where they can operate on their own, including a centralized talent acquisition team and centralized chief marketing and revenue officers.

This has led to a world where the firm has, for example, been able to integrate a customer relationship management system in “30 to 45 days” instead of “12 to 18 months,” said Peddycord.

How does AI fit in

The company is happy to use third-party applications that can cut costs, but it’s a waste of their own resources, said Peddycord.

“I have a belief that everybody’s so focused on cost-cutting that third parties are going to pick off all the low-hanging fruit there,” Peddycord said. “So us trying to invest our dollars to go create things that other people are creating and probably investing more dollars to do isn’t the right place to spend our money.”

The first tool they invested in was finding companies to purchase. The data on platforms like Pitchbook and Crunchbase is “very, very incomplete” at the sub-$10 million EBITDA level the firm invests in, said Peddycord, so the firm first invested “heavily” in ways to find these companies and start pitching them.

Soon, the firm realized that this ability to find a lot of “non-public information” about companies and then reach out to them would also be “super relevant” for their portfolio companies when they’re looking for new customers, Peddycord said.

Peddycord provided the example of identifying potential customers for its manufacturing portfolio companies that sell to the government, aerospace, or defense industries.

“When Blue Origin wins a large contract, there is some public information that we are able to gather to identify what it is that they won the contract for, and we can even reverse engineer what sub-component parts and services are going to be necessary to then go create that,” Peddycord said.

From there, the firm’s portfolio companies could “get in the door earlier” to offer their sub-component manufacturing help, Peddycord said.

“In those high-growth areas like aerospace and defense, they are working as hard to find new qualified suppliers as we are to find new customers,” Peddycord said.