oday's guest's journey into buying businesses began 10 years ago.

Eric Calderon learned about the concept at Harvard Business School, which he entered with the idea that he would return to a corporate path and become an executive.

But he took Rick & Royce's class and decided that this is what he would do instead.

And he did, buying a business in his native Houston, with Rick & Royce as investors.

We hear the story of that search & exit, as well as what Eric is doing today.

Which is building TXE Partners, his holdco that buys small testing, inspection, and calibration (TIC) businesses.

Today TXE has aggregate revenues of $25m.

So this is a story of an entrepreneur who did a traditional search first, learned an industry, exited, then for his second chapter set out to build a long-term holdco — and is doing it.

Now you'll notice that Eric himself never refers to TXE as a holdco; that's my word.

So it's not like he's been bitten by the holdco trend. No, Eric is building a sector-specific enterprise in TIC. The businesses he acquires complement each other and fill gaps in the enterprise. You'll hear him say he thinks of them as divisions of the company, as opposed to standalone businesses in a holdco.

We cover many themes in Eric's journey and around what he's building with TXE, including:

• Shared services in a holdco vs. decentralization
• Raising patient capital from investors committed to a long-term hold
• Buying a business in the oil & gas industry, which is typically avoided by searchers
• The advantage of assembling a holdco of smaller, $1m SDE businesses
• And the tension Eric feels around his own identity — is he an operator, or is he an investor?

And here he is, Eric Calderon, owner of TXE Partners.