Chase Murdock Bootstrapped a Salt Lake City Holdco by Buying Tiny and Building Slow

The Setup Chase Murdock did not raise a search fund. He did not run a proprietary deal process against a $5M EBITDA target. He and his partner Adam wanted to own businesses in their hometown of Salt Lake City and had limited capital to deploy, so they let the capital constraint dictate the strategy: buy very small, buy with cash they had, and build the holdco one deal at a time. The name tells you the thesis. Decada. Decades. This is not a three-year flip. It is a generational hold structure built by two operators who wanted optionality over their own time and a portfolio of businesses they actually enjoy running. The Deal Decada Group is a bootstrapped holdco with no outside investors. Over roughly two years leading into mid-2023, Chase and Adam closed on three businesses: - A custom hat maker (artisan manufacturing, retail-adjacent) - An artist workshop (creative community space) - An ADU builder (accessory dwelling unit construction) Each acquisition was small enough to fund without institutional debt or equity partners. Specific prices were not disclosed, but the pattern is clear: micro-deals, 100% ownership, debt-light structure, cash flow reinvested into the next business. The businesses do not share obvious operational synergies. No shared back office thesis, no route density play, no bolt-on roll-up logic. The through-line is the operators, the city, and the willingness to run weird little companies that a traditional search fund would never touch. Operating Moves The portfolio construction itself is the first move. By buying three unrelated small businesses instead of one larger platform, Chase and Adam built diversification on a shoestring and gave themselves three independent growth levers. The 5x target per business is the operating north star. That translates into a playbook focused on owner-operator basics: tightening pricing, documenting tribal knowledge from the outgoing seller, building repeatable sales motion, and reinvesting cash flow rather than extracting it. At this scale, a hat maker going from $300K to $1.5M in revenue is a realistic five-year arc if distribution and product mix get real attention. Operating Lessons - Let capital dictate deal size. If you have $200K, stop hunting $5M EBITDA businesses. Buy what you can close on and prove the model before raising. - Small does not mean bad. Sub-$500K businesses are often mispriced because no institutional buyer will touch them. That is the edge for a bootstrapper. - Name the holdco for the hold period. Decada forces discipline. If the brand implies decades, you will not panic-sell in year three. - Build a portfolio of unrelated bets when synergy is fake. Three small companies in different verticals beat one wobbly platform if you cannot actually integrate them. - Reinvest the cash, do not distribute it. A bootstrapped holdco grows at the speed of its own cash flow. Owner salary first, then capex, then the next deal. - Buy in your hometown. Lower operating friction, stronger seller trust, easier to show up in person when something breaks.