Gat Caperton Cold-Called His Way Into a West Virginia Furniture Plant at 29

The Setup Gat Caperton grew up in West Virginia, went north for school, then spent the early-to-mid 1990s working for Sam Zell in Chicago while taking business classes at night. Zell's shop was a hard education in capital allocation, deal structure, and real assets. Caperton wanted to run something, not analyze it, and he wanted to go home. West Virginia does not have a thick market of sellable businesses. Manufacturing was what he knew, and the Appalachian hardwood belt had a base of small, family-run wood shops quietly aging out. The Deal He did not wait for a broker. He cold-called. The seller was, in Caperton's own framing, 'an old guy building furniture' in Berkeley Springs, a town of a few thousand people. Caperton was 29. The deal closed in 1996. Purchase price and financing terms are not public, but the archetype is familiar: small rural manufacturer, owner ready to be done, a young buyer willing to move to the town and sign personally. The business became Gat Creek. Operating Moves The strategic call that shaped the next 28 years was staying American-made through the exact decade that killed most US furniture manufacturing. When competitors offshored to Asia in the 2000s, Caperton kept production in West Virginia and leaned into the channel that rewarded domestic craft: premium, design-forward retailers willing to pay for a real supply chain. Room & Board became a major customer, and that partnership is the backbone of the book today. Post-Covid, with supply chains snarled and domestic manufacturing suddenly fashionable again, Caperton did not harvest. He reinvested. The plan is to roughly double the plant over about seven years, from roughly $25M in annual revenue toward a $60M target. That means capacity, people, and working capital, not cost cuts. Operating Lessons - Cold-calling small-town owners still works. Brokered deal flow is thin in places like Berkeley Springs; the buyer who shows up in person and writes the letter owns the funnel. - Pick a durable strategic posture early and defend it. Staying domestic through the offshoring wave looked stubborn in 2005 and looks brilliant in 2024. The moat is the 20 years you did not quit. - Anchor customers are leverage, not risk, if the relationship is built on quality and reliability rather than price. Room & Board is a distribution partner, not a Walmart squeeze. - Reinvest when the cycle turns in your favor. Covid gave domestic furniture makers a window; Caperton is spending into it rather than taking chips off the table. - Long ownership compounds. Twenty-eight years in one seat means the operator knows every machine, every supplier, every customer buyer personally. That is a real asset that does not show up on a balance sheet. Where They Are Now Gat Creek is roughly a $25M revenue wood furniture manufacturer in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, still owned and run by Caperton. The stated target is $60M over about seven years, funded by capacity investment rather than acquisition. Caperton is not signaling a sale....