Brick by Brick
Will Smith recently released a YouTube docuseries entitled ‘Best Shape of My Life’, and it is a must-watch if you are a fan. The series follows his journey to losing twenty pounds and wrapping up his memoir, but is much more intimate into the life and struggles of Will Smith beyond a mere celebrity fitness series. For example, at the start of the second episode, Will tells this story from his childhood:
“My father was my hero. His name will Willard Carroll Smith, but we all called him Daddy-O. He demanded rigid perfection from himself and the people around him. When I was eleven years old, he decided he wanted a new wall on the front of his shop. He thought it would be a good project for my younger brother Harry and me. Every day for nearly a year, my brother and I would go to my father’s shop after school to work on that wall. There were so many times I remember looking at that hole totally discouraged. But Daddy-O wouldn’t let us stop. “Stop thinking about the damn wall,” he said. “Your job is to lay this brick perfectly. Then move on to the next brick. Don’t be worrying about no wall. Your only concern is one brick.”
This “brick by brick” concept immediately struck a chord with me, and of course, reminded me of North Beach Holdings.
As investors or business owners, it is often easy to zoom out and think of the wall. Whether you’re chasing a certain return, a percentage of revenue growth, or generating a certain amount of free cash flow, the wall is infatuating.
At North Beach, our ‘wall’ is creating a best-in-class holding company modeled on the principles of some of history’s greatest wall-builders (Buffet & Munger, Vanderbilt, Rockefeller, etc.). We do our best to focus on laying the bricks all day, every day. First, we try to do thorough due diligence on prospective companies without compromising our business model and quality or price principles. We also try to build a carefully constructed portfolio of public companies. Finally, we try to only buy when the odds are in our favor.
Our dedicated research process, investment checklist, time-horizon, and willingness to walk away from the table helps ensure that we are laying each brick in the North Beach wall as perfectly as possible.
But, of course, things happen.
Deals fall through. Attractive equities become too expensive. Problems arise at the operating company level. Stocks don’t trade where you think they will. The board of a public company makes a decision you vehemently disagree with. Sometimes it feels like that wall will never be built, but we refocus and go right back to laying the bricks – as perfectly as possible.
When Will Smith and his brother finished the wall, Daddy-O looked at them and said: “Don’t you all ever tell me that you can’t do something.” Our goal at North Beach is to rationally compound capital for decades to come and build our best-in-class holding company “wall.”