A four-year search, a gift basket company, and the case for generational ownership
A former HBS-trained PE associate spent four years searching, acquired a 12-employee Toronto gift basket maker, and built it into a $30M B-Corp explicitly rejecting search-fund exit timelines
The Setup
Robin Kovitz grew up as a third-generation entrepreneur in Alberta, Canada, working in her father's meat processing business from age 10. She moved into investment banking at Toronto's M&A group, earned an MBA from Harvard Business School, then secured one of ten available seats in Canadian private equity. Approaching 30 and wanting to start a family, she realized investment banking and PE were structurally incompatible with the motherhood model she envisioned. The search began.
The Search (2011-2014)
Four years. Thousands of in-person owner meetings. No mass email campaigns. Personal visits to competitors. Kovitz developed what she calls "muscle memory" for identifying quality businesses, which she describes as the most underrated skill of long searches. Her quote captures the orientation: "Time is not the metric... you're going to look back in 15 years or seven years."
The Three Non-Negotiables Framework
She built a deal-evaluation framework around three criteria:
- No customer concentration. Thousands of recurring customers, not dependent on a few large accounts. Lesson from her father's business and its vulnerability to single-customer loss. - Repeat customers. Short repurchase cycles, existing customer database, frequent reorder behavior. -
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