The Ridgefield Partners founding partner shares what acquiring and owning LDK Logistics taught him that decades as an investor couldn’t, and how it now shapes the way he advises business owners.
Richard Waryn built the kind of investment career many executives aspire to, working at the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation and raising and managing more than six billion dollars in emerging market private equity. He led major deals in places like India, China, Russia, the Middle East and Europe. Eventually, though, he saw himself sitting across the other side of the table as well. Owning a company where he was the main decision maker had been on his bucket list for a long time, so he set out to acquire and run one himself. The experience taught him things that years of evaluating businesses from the outside never could.
Waryn, now the founding partner of Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) advisory firm Ridgefield Partners, spent two years looking at roughly 200 companies before he found the right one. He was open to any sector but held firm criteria, including a long record of financial stability, a niche that couldn’t be outsourced overseas, and a management team already in place. LDK Logistics, a Colorado company known for what it calls “velvet glove” delivery of large, high-value equipment for data centers, hospitals and retailers, checked every box. Additionally, LDK in its industry had already served an essential corner of the economy, but he never imagined the Al boom would arrive in the middle of his ownership and send demand from data centers soaring.