Interview with Justin Luettgerodt

Last week I had the pleasure of having a conversation with Justin Luettgerodt, founder and CEO of The Aclaime Group. Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Justin was highly involved in sports. His mother started and ran a home day care service and Justin mentioned that was where he was first exposed to the idea of entrepreneurship. Having that entrepreneurial influence on him at such a young age greatly contributed to his passion for starting businesses. He played football throughout his schooling which ultimately led to him receiving a football scholarship to play for BYU in 2004. Although he wasn’t LDS at the time, he decided BYU was a better place to be than the junior college he was attending in pretty much all aspects.

Although Justin had started some small businesses in junior college, he really enjoyed the idea of networking with the large alumni foundation at BYU to gain some insight into the market and hopefully start a more successful business there. So that’s exactly what he did.

Justin found a loophole in the housing contracts for BYU that allowed him to buy and sell houses for students to live in outside of BYU’s previously set boundaries. This meant that he was able to buy and sell property for cheaper than the competition, but at a great profit for himself. As the business grew, Justin decided to change its direction into a private equity firm. This firm became what is now known today as The Aclaime Group.

The Aclaime Group has around 130 employees across all of its companies and is mainly focused on buying high-growth businesses regardless of the market. The firm has a very long-term approach to business and is not planning on selling any of the companies anytime soon. When I asked Justin what the logic behind this method was, he described it as owning a lot of pumps. The firm tries to grow the businesses to a point where they just continually pump in money and assets into the firm. I found this approach to be very interesting and asked Justin if there was a limit that he saw on how many businesses the firm could handle. He responded by pointing out that the firm is learning more about limitations every day. He takes a very hands on approach with all of his companies and the idea is to have a handful of things to work on, but not such a large handful that things start slipping through the cracks. He’s all about taking baby steps with an end goal in mind.

Finally, I asked Justin what advice he would give to me or any other aspiring entrepreneur. The first thing that he said was to not wait; just go for it. He stressed that you’re never going to have all of the information and that if you can just have 51% of it, you’re golden. He said to make sure your employee’s interests are aligned with your vision and if they’re not, fix it. People are everything in a start-up and if you don’t have the right people, you don’t have a business. Overall, he said to not try for “off the shelf” answers. Go figure it out for yourself.