oday's guest is all about bringing "founder mode" to his acquisition.

Aizik Zimerman acquired J. Blanton, a plumbing business in Chicago.

Aizik intends to spend years, decades maybe, building his life's work in this industry.

I thought this vision was compelling, so much so that I talked about it in a recent speech at the Southeastern ETA conference at UVA, where I said essentially the following:

This concept of founder mode is borrowed from tech land, where Y-Combinator founder Paul Graham made it famous.

The idea is essentially that as founder of your company, resist the conventional wisdom of delegate, delegate, delegate. That you should put great people in management positions, then get out of their way.

Instead, you should sweat the details, and be engaged more actively, more deeply than our notion of what the ideal chief executive looks like.

"Founder mode" was controversial, it kicked off debate across Silicon Valley, but agree with it or not, it’s a useful concept.

Particularly in ETA, where the holy grail is often taken to be building the business into one that runs without you.

On Acquiring Minds, I too celebrate that outcome.

But, there is something to be said for pouring yourself into the business you buy, rather than trying to figure how you can extricate yourself as quickly as possible.

You might characterize these dueling orientations as the private equity approach vs. the founder approach.

As you'll hear, Aizik falls squarely in one of those two camps. Which one resonates with you?

Here he is, Aizik Zimerman, owner of J. Blanton.