I've come to believe the flashiest opportunity in the room is usually not the best one. The best one is usually the one nobody's paying attention to because it doesn't make a good story at a cocktail party.
Every Business Needs to Get Paid
I've bought and sold a bunch of companies. Here's the one thing every single one of them had in common, no matter how different the business: someone, somewhere, had to process a payment.
Not glamorous. Not the kind of thing that gets a founder invited to speak at a conference. But absolutely essential, every single day, for every business that takes a card.
That's the whole idea behind Coastal Plains.
The Business Nobody Talks About
Merchant processing is one of those industries that's everywhere and invisible at the same time. Every coffee shop, every dentist's office, every plumber who takes a credit card is running through a payment processing relationship in the background. It's recurring. It's contractual. And it doesn't care whether the economy is having a good year or a bad one — people still buy coffee, still go to the dentist, still pay the plumber.
I've come to believe the flashiest opportunity in the room is usually not the best one. The best one is usually the one nobody's paying attention to because it doesn't make a good story at a cocktail party.
you can read more about my philosophy here
Why Clotine is In
With Coastal Plains, we are providing growth capital to companies that sell and manage merchant accounts — the businesses that go out and win the merchants in the first place. Specifically, we're financing their customer acquisition process, giving them the fuel to scale faster and build enterprise value more quickly. We're selective about who we back here: we're only working with the “hyperscalers” of the merchant services world, the operators who have already proven they can grow accounts efficiently and are just looking for the capital to do it faster. It's a structure I understand from the inside: I've spent years around businesses that live or die by cash flow timing, not just top-line growth. This isn't a bet on an idea. It's a bet on a business that already works, getting bigger.
The Case for Boring
Here's the thing about me and unglamorous businesses: I actually love them. The tool and die shop I worked in as a teenager wasn't exciting. Neither was managing cash flow for a business that made metal parts nobody ever saw. But that's where I learned that unglamorous and unprofitable are not the same thing. Some of the best money I've ever made came from businesses that would put a stranger to sleep in a conversation.
There's a certain discipline to staying in your lane on this stuff. Payment processing infrastructure doesn't need a pitch — it needs volume, retention, and consistency. Clotine can take that seriously and still not take itself too seriously in the process.
What This Adds to the Portfolio
Coastal Plains rounds out something I think matters a lot in how we have built this fund. Summit Bridge is receivables. Presidia is housing. Coastal Plains is recurring processing revenue. Different engines, different rhythms, all grounded in the same idea — real businesses, real cash flow, structured with real discipline.
The Bottom Line
I didn't get into this because merchant processing is thrilling. I got into it because it works, because it's been vetted the same way we vet everything else we bring into this fund, and because I've been around enough unglamorous, recurring-revenue businesses to know that's usually where the real money quietly gets made.
Nobody's ever going to make a movie about merchant processing. That's sort of the point.
Our new investment vertical, Coastal Plains, is now on-line and ready for accredited investors. Contact us to learn more.
