Rick Sanford, CEO of Complete Aerospace Solutions, Inc., is deploying capital through reverse mergers where founders retain 100% equity ownership while accessing growth funding. They provide capital for scale, but the original ownership keeps their equity and board control. Instead of taking upfront equity stakes, Complete Aerospace participates in a small percentage of annual growth each year until exit. The bottleneck isn't capital availability, however; the constraint is finding companies fast enough to deploy it.
They're currently in due diligence on 20 companies with 50 more in the pipeline and operating across five verticals leveraging syndicate partners who've already completed due diligence on companies "too small for them to acquire" (under $500M) but still need patient capital. Rick accomplishes this by verifying stated requirements match actual mission intent, bringing commercial solutions forward rather than getting paid to study problems, and prioritizing execution ruthlessly because "smart engineers with enough time and money can build anything, but there's never enough time or money."
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