What CEJ Capital is for

This is the first of these letters. One will follow each quarter. It sets down what CEJ Capital is for, so that every later letter can be read against it.

We don’t write checks. We build. What we put into a company is mostly operating expertise, infrastructure and time: the systems, software, pricing and operations it needs to grow, and people who have built them before.

CEJ Capital is new as a company. The work behind it is not. EVRT, the trade name of Everett Advisors LLC and one of the companies CEJ Holdings owns, has been building that infrastructure for growing companies since 2023. Today the work spans seven operating companies across e-commerce, manufacturing, services and real estate. CEJ Capital exists to hold what that work earns.

Every partnership starts as EVRT work. A founder brings us a company that has outgrown the way it is run. We look for more than $1M a year in revenue, a product people already pay for, and a problem that sits in operations rather than marketing. If both sides want to go further, CEJ Capital takes a minority stake, typically 10–30%, or a royalty arrangement. Either is earned through the work. Sometimes cash goes in alongside it, but the work comes first, and it is the larger part of what we contribute.

The first 90 days are hands-on. We find where the friction is and take it out. We put in the software, the pricing, the dashboards and the automation. The founder’s team learns each piece as it goes in and takes it over as it settles. What we build is theirs to run.

Why a separate company at all? CEJ Holdings owns and runs operating businesses. The stakes we earn in other founders’ companies are something else, so they are held in a company of their own, for its own account, apart from those businesses and their liabilities.

The money, when there is any, is our own, in a precise sense. CEJ Capital is wholly owned by CEJ Holdings, and it invests solely the capital of its owner and affiliates, for its own account. It does not raise funds. It does not solicit, accept, pool or manage anyone else’s capital. It is not an investment adviser, a broker, a dealer or a fund.

Owning the money ourselves decides how long we hold. A fund answers to the people whose money it holds, and sooner or later it has to give that money back. That puts a date on every stake it owns.

We have no such date. We hold what we earn.

If a founder sells the company, we sell alongside them. Until then, we stay.

That also sets the limits of what we do. We take minority positions. We don’t take control of the companies we work with, and we don’t run them. The founder runs the company. We build underneath it, and we stay involved for as long as we hold the stake.

These letters will report on that work as it happens, including what we built and where we got it wrong. Each will carry a number and a date, so that together they read as a record. They will never ask anyone for money, because we don’t take it. CEJ Capital does not offer securities, solicit or accept outside investment, or provide investment advice, and nothing in these letters is an offer to sell or a solicitation to buy any security.

That is what CEJ Capital is for. The next letter will be about the work itself.