Sector: Commerce
Principals: Cordell Jacks, Mike Miller
Year Launched: 2022
Unique selling proposition: As thousands of Canadian business owners are retiring, often without succession plans, buying the strong companies will ensure they survive.
Strategy: Creating an investment fund and finding entrepreneurs who will grow the existing companies in a socially and environmentally superior way, a regeneration.
Website: regenerativecapitalgroup.com
The optimism and enthusiasm in Cordell Jacks’s voice are indisputable. Jacks is CEO at Regenerative Capital Group, a Campbell River-based investment fund that is opening a new path for business backing. Mike Miller, who has held high-level positions at RBC Dominion Securities and Investors Group, is chair.
Jacks and Miller first connected in Winnipeg, where Miller hired Jacks when he graduated from the Asper School of Business. Serendipitously, both eventually chose Campbell River as home base.
Jacks has experience working in more than 50 countries in areas as varied as agro-technology and ocean plastic remediation. A long-time acquisition entrepreneur, Miller had given away millions to startups, but wasn’t satisfied with the results. When he and Jacks melded their business acumen and research, Regenerative was generated.
In a play on words, “Regenerative” can mean creating a renewed existence, which the company does by using a new generation of CEOs.
The eureka moment came about when Jacks and Miller considered the silver tsunami that will hit Canada in the next decade or so.
Almost one million businesses, 75 per cent of all Canadian small/medium enterprises (SME), will change hands or fold, involving over $2 trillion
in business and assets, Jacks says. To keep the businesses vital, Regenerative will buy companies that have proven their worth and then grow the companies from there. “It’s entrepreneurship through acquisition,” says Jacks.
But environmental awareness, health and relationships are also key.
“We want to create companies that don’t just look at profit,” Jacks explains. “We want to unlearn industrial ways of being.”
Regenerative Capital is in the process of amassing a $25-million fund that will be used to purchase businesses. They are closing in on the $20 million mark, thanks in part to a recent $5-million investment from the federal government’s Social Finance Fund, Jacks says.
Regenerative has already found five entrepreneurs who will serve as CEOs of the purchased SME companies with EBITDAs ranging from $1 million to $5 million. Over 200 Canadians applied to be considered as one of the five business leaders.
“This is a great platform for the next generation of entrepreneurs,” he adds.
