The LFM Quarterly // Oh The Places You’ll Go
In addition to Urubamba and Beyond!, this edition features a spotlight on one of our add-on searches, our summer interns, and some happenings around the LFM Portfolio!
Urubamba and Beyond!
by Jessica Ginsberg, LFM Managing Director, Business Development
Expanding Horizons
I have always been a fan of sleepaway camp. Get those kids off their screens (and the couch) and into the great outdoors where physical challenges abound and they can put their social skills to the test. As my kids have gotten older, I have tried to keep them on their toes and out of their comfort zones.
This year, we sent our 16-year-old son, Chase, off on a three-week trip to Urubamba, in Peru’s Sacred Valley. The stage was set for three weeks of cultural immersion, incredible sights, and community service – all with no cell phone, no friends and only a few hours of Spanish practice on Duolingo leading up to departure.
Observations from the Field
Two moments that Chase described from the trip stuck with me the most.
Watching a local weaver make a poncho on a backstrap loom — one end tied to a rock, the other looped around her own waist, her body taking the place of a machine to keep the tension right. There wasn’t a pattern or design to be found, just working from memory and years of experience, probably passed down from generation to generation.
Mixing and laying cement. Chase’s group spent days helping build out stretches of irrigation canals so nearby communities would have better water access once the dry season hit — hauling, pouring, smoothing, working alongside villagers who've been solving this exact problem (how do you get water down a mountain) since long before anyone had a job title like "civil engineer." Chase was amazed at how much better and faster elderly villagers could do this work than his group of fit, able-bodied teenagers. Turns out the Inca have been doing this same work for more than 500 years!
Finding Manufacturing in the Andes
Enter Chase’s dorky mom (that's me),“Chase! This sounds just like manufacturing - I learn about stuff like this at work every day!”
No conveyor belts, no automated machines and no factories per say, but manufacturing all the same, it's people figuring out how to make something and make it well and then teaching others around them, so the magic can keep happening.
Which, naturally, got me thinking more about what we do here at LFM. We invest in companies like APQS, which builds automated quilting machines, essentially teaching a machine to do what quilters have been doing by hand for years. Different tools, different scale, but the same idea as that weaver: get the pattern right and get it right the same way every time.
And then there is L&R Industries, our most recent platform investment, which makes the industrial reels that carry conduit for fiber-to-the-home installations (helping bring broadband to more of the country). A stretch of hand-poured concrete in the Andes and a reel rolling off L&R's line are helping to solve the same basic problem from two different centuries - how do you build something that reliably gets people what they need (water, bandwidth, take your pick) and keeps doing it for years? One answer is a village showing up with shovels and stone. The other is precision tooling and an automated line. Both seem to be working just fine!
The Bottom Line
Manufacturing isn't just what happens inside of a factory - it's what happens anytime people organize skills and materials into something that lasts. Chase came home from Peru having seen that up close, still sore from pushing that wheel barrel full of cement, and then I was lucky enough to get to reflect on how the companies we look at aren’t all that different — they're doing what humans have always done, just with more equipment.
Said another way, manufacturing is all about the people — doing the work, putting in the time and setting foundation for generations to come. I’m so proud to be a part of that value chain from our corner of the world here in Nashville.
Enjoy the rest of your summer!
AttachCo Add-on Search
Intern Corner
Around the Portfolio
This summer, LFM Capital hosted the MIT Leaders for Global Operations (LGO) class of 2028 at Alloy Specialties.
LFM summer interns, Lexi and Mary, took a tour of the Vintage Air facility in San Antonio, TX. Getting to visit Vintage Air and walk the floor is their favorite memory of the summer!
Pictured here is the Vintage Air leadership team with Ashley Prisant, Portfolio Chief Human Resources Officer, who facilities team and leadership training sessions across LFM’s portfolio companies.
ABOUT LFM CAPITAL
LFM Capital is a private equity firm based in Nashville, Tennessee. The firm’s mission is to partner with portfolio company management to develop and build world-class operations through a combination of manufacturing and operations excellence and targeted growth and expansion strategies.