The HoldCo & Acquisition Entrepreneur Conference Guide for 2027

The problem with most business conferences

Most business conferences are designed for one of two audiences: beginners (content about starting a business, finding your first customer, building a side hustle) or enterprises (content about Fortune 500 scale, hundreds of millions in revenue, IPO strategy). Neither of those is useful if you're a seasoned operator building across multiple businesses.

The holdco operator, the acquisition entrepreneur who's closed two or three deals, the CEO running a PE-backed platform — these people need to talk about capital allocation across a portfolio, M&A integration realities, and how to structure management when you own businesses you're not operating day-to-day. That content doesn't exist at most conferences because the audience is too narrow to build a 2,000-person event around.

The result: operators at this stage either stop going to conferences entirely, or pay to attend events where they spend three days in content that isn't relevant to their actual problems.

What a conference actually built for this audience covers

If you're evaluating whether a conference is worth your time and $5,000–$10,000 in ticket price, travel, and lost work days, here's what it should actually address:

• Holdco structure and entity setup: How to structure a parent company, subsidiaries, shared services, and management. When to consolidate, when to keep separate. Tax implications of different structures.
• Capital allocation across a portfolio: How to think about deploying cash flow from Business A into acquiring Business B. Return thresholds, reinvestment discipline, and when to distribute instead.
• M&A integration — the real version: Not the theory. The actual 90-day post-close period, what breaks first, how to manage culture when you're not the operator, what due diligence misses.
• The operator-to-owner transition: The specific inflection point where you stop running businesses and start owning them. What skills transfer, what doesn't, how to build management layers that hold without you.
• Deal sourcing at scale: How to build a repeatable pipeline instead of chasing one-off opportunities. Proprietary deal flow, broker relationships, direct outreach, and network-based sourcing.
• Working with outside capital: Search fund structures, independent sponsor models, when to take on LPs, how to think about alignment with investors who have different timelines than you.

The ETA community in 2027

Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition (ETA) has grown significantly over the past five years. What started as a primarily MBA-driven phenomenon — search funds, searchers spending two years looking for one business to buy and operate — has expanded into a much broader community of operators taking different paths to the same destination.

Today the ETA community includes:

• Traditional search funds: MBA graduates raising search capital to find, acquire, and operate one business
• Self-funded searchers: Operators who find and acquire a business without taking on search capital, maintaining more equity
• Holdco builders: Operators who've closed one deal and are actively building toward a portfolio of 3–10+ businesses
• Independent sponsors: Deal-by-deal operators who source acquisitions and bring in deal-specific capital rather than raising a fund
• Serial acquirers: Operators running programmatic acquisition strategies — buying multiple businesses per year in a systematic way

The range of experience and strategy within this community is wide. A first-time searcher and a holdco operator running eight businesses have very different problems, and conferences that try to serve both often serve neither well.

What to look for when evaluating an operators conference

Criteria	What to look for	Red flag
Room size	Under 200 people — you can meet everyone	1,000+ attendees — impossible to build real relationships
Ticket price	$5,000+ — functions as a quality filter	$500 or less — self-selection problem, mixed room quality
Speaker types	Active practitioners currently operating businesses	Consultants, coaches, authors packaging other people's experience
Content level	Advanced — assumes you've already built something	Foundational — "how to start your first business" content
Format	Small breakouts, open discussion, practitioner-led sessions	Keynote-heavy, one-to-many, no opportunity to go deep
Setting	Shared environment — everyone eats, stays, and socializes together	Convention center — people scatter after sessions, no organic connection

Compound Conference: built specifically for this community

Compound Conference started because Michael Girdley and the team around it faced exactly this problem. At a certain stage of building, the conferences that had been useful stopped being relevant. The content was too basic, the room was too mixed, and the signal-to-noise ratio was too low to justify the time.

The design of Compound Conference addresses this directly:

• Hard cap at 150 attendees. Small enough that everyone can meet everyone. The cap isn't a logistical constraint — it's the product.
• $7,500 ticket price. This filters the room. The people who pay $7,500 to attend a conference are the people who've already built something and believe three days with the right operators is worth it.
• Practitioners only on stage. Every speaker at Compound Conference is currently operating. No consultants, no theorists.
• All-inclusive at Sundance Mountain Resort. Everyone stays, eats, and skis together for three days. The environment is designed to produce real conversations — not a ballroom full of people checking their phones between panels.

The conference draws multi-business owners, holdco builders, acquisition entrepreneurs who've closed deals, PE-backed platform operators, and independent sponsors. The common thread is that everyone in the room has built real businesses and is now trying to figure out what comes next.

Compound Conference 2027 runs February 8–11 at Sundance Mountain Resort, Utah. 150 spots. All-inclusive at $7,500.