INVRT on Substack
Essays on capital allocation, quality, maintenance and enduring enterprises, roughly monthly. Free to read.
Building Enduring Quality Into Systems
We partner with founders, family businesses, and growth companies to build enterprises designed to create value for generations.
The Value of Compounding
We bring a systems thinking approach to every engagement, drawing on principles from natural design, multi generational family businesses, and quality focused organizations.
Capital Compounding
Quality businesses generate superior returns through durable competitive advantages that strengthen with age, pricing power that improves with reputation, and efficient capital allocation.
Relationship Compounding
The most valuable relationships compound through deepening trust, expanded opportunity access through network effects, and resilience during market disruptions.
Systems Value Creation
Systems oriented businesses create accelerating value through reinforcing feedback loops, network effects that increase with scale and time, and adaptability that converts challenges into growth opportunities.
Practice
Compounding Business Value
Strategic acquisitions that strengthen the system rather than dilute it.
Learn moreCompounding Equity Value
Portfolio design and governance for multi generational success.
Learn moreCompounding Investor Value
Partners who share the long horizon, and the structures that hold them.
Learn morePaul Higgins
More than fifteen years across private equity, corporate finance and M&A, working as an investor, a deal adviser, an adviser to CEOs and their operating teams, a board member and a builder of software products.
Since 2020, through INVRT, he has advised on ten acquisitions across Ireland, continental Europe, North America and Latin America, ranging from €10M to more than $150M with a combined enterprise value above €300M. The work spans acquisitions, exits, succession and capital structure, in industries from healthcare, waste management and insurance broking to food and beverage, industrial manufacturing, consulting services and software. Alongside the transactions, he works directly with chief executives and operating executives, and with the general partners, limited partners and venture firms behind them, on the business itself: go to market, operating model, hiring and execution, unit economics and the path to exit. With family offices and family boards he advises across generations, on ownership, governance and the transition from operating company to holding company.
Before founding INVRT he worked at Waterland Private Equity, in Accenture's Global M&A team across Europe, the UK and the US, where he advised the board on capital allocation, and in Ernst & Young's Corporate Finance division in the UK and Ireland, where he completed more than ten cross border transactions, including take private acquisitions valued at several hundred million dollars. His formative experience was as an analyst at Wallace Capital Management, a value oriented investment firm in Dallas.
He has served on the boards of companies in healthcare and scientific testing. From 2021 to 2023 he advised Stripe on the 2023 edition of Poor Charlie's Almanack, building the network of subject matter experts that carried Munger's principles beyond finance to founders and operators. He writes on capital allocation, maintenance and enduring enterprises, and is the creator and co host of The Art of Quality podcast.
He holds a BA in Economics from University College Dublin, is a Chartered Accountant with Chartered Accountants Ireland, and completed the Executive Value Investing Programme at Columbia Business School.
Recognition
He is a contributor to Eric Markowitz's OUTLAST (Scribner, 2027). His writing on enduring enterprises has been highlighted by Stewart Brand and featured in Big Think's The Nightcrawler, and he is acknowledged in The Contemplative Leader by Patrick Boland and The Compounder's Element by Laurence Endersen.
Global Network
Communities he belongs to and learns from.
Stay close to the thinking
The research, essays and conversations behind the work, in two places.
The Art of Quality
Conversations with the people behind businesses, crafts and institutions that have lasted, on what it takes to build something worthy of persisting.