Jeff Totten once made money by stopping time. In high school, he photographed sporting events and sold the pictures to parents. A game ended; the photograph stayed. The proceeds went into public-company shares. Before he was old enough to run a holding company, he had found a pleasing arrangement: do some work today, then own something that might become more valuable tomorrow.
Evergreen, the company he co-founded in 2017, applies that instinct to businesses. It acquires technology services firms and intends to own them permanently. By spring 2026, the group was describing more than 160 acquisitions and roughly $1.5 billion in revenue. The group has grown a considerable distance from parents buying photographs on the sidelines.
The interesting part is what he wants to keep as the numbers grow: local names, local decisions and people who have a reason to care about the next decade. Buying a company is a transaction. Remaining its owner is an ongoing obligation, with fewer opportunities to declare the work finished.
The camera paid for the shares
Totten's first business makes his later interests easier to understand. A photographer needs customers. An investor needs patience. He was trying both before college. By the time he reached Berkeley, he wanted an investing career and looked for a place that would let a young person take on consequential work.
He graduated from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business in 2013. He graduated with highest honors and Phi Beta Kappa, and served as president of the Berkeley Investment Group. At Alpine Investors, where he went to work after college, he advanced to vice president and invested in business services. His board experience included YouCaring, MidAmerica, Risk Management Strategies and Constructive Media.
There is a useful connection between those early opportunities and the company he later built. Totten had benefited from being trusted before accumulating a long résumé. Giving other leaders responsibility early became part of Evergreen's approach. In 2018, he described early responsibility as a way to expand what a person could achieve.
“We are often limited more by what we are allowed to do than by what we are capable of doing.”
Jeff Totten, 2018
A company conceived between flights
In 2017, Totten attended Berkshire Hathaway's shareholder meeting with Alpine colleagues. On the return journey, during a layover in Denver, he emailed Alpine founder Graham Weaver with a proposal: combine long-term business ownership with Alpine's approach to developing leaders. Acquire companies, help them grow, and keep them.
Weaver agreed to meet the following day. Totten also met Dan Sanner, his mentor, who helped bring the proposal to Alpine's partnership. A proposal went to Alpine's partnership; within weeks, the idea had approval. It still needed an industry, an acquisition and a team. Ramsey Sahyoun's arrival supplied a crucial partner for finding businesses to buy.
The airport origin has the charm of a compressed business fable. Its less glamorous detail matters more: an idea moved because other people took it seriously. Totten had backing, advisers and a co-founder. The long horizon began with some very prompt meetings.
The first business had a name worth keeping
Wolf Consulting, in the Pittsburgh area, became Evergreen's first managed IT services acquisition in 2018. Its founder, Lloyd Wolf, had started the business in 1989 and spent nearly three decades building it. Selling meant deciding what should happen to employees and to a company that already had a life of its own.
Evergreen's offer of continuing independence mattered to Wolf. He wanted the business held for the long term and his people to have opportunities to grow. A new owner could provide resources without requiring the old identity to disappear. By 2025, Wolf Consulting was still operating independently in Pittsburgh under Evergreen's ownership.
That gives Totten's idea a human scale. The object being acquired is more than revenue under a heading in a spreadsheet. It is a name that clients recognize and a workplace people know. Keeping those things creates obligations the purchase agreement cannot neatly itemize. A founder handing over the keys has good reason to read beyond the price.
Joins Alpine after college
With Ramsey Sahyoun
First MSP acquisition
About $1.5B group revenue
A large owner with small-company manners
The practical pitch extends beyond leaving the sign above the door. Evergreen companies can draw on vendor purchasing agreements, operator peer groups and a growth playbook. Businesses retain their brands and technology stacks while gaining access to other people dealing with similar problems. Independence comes with company.
Evergreen organizes that community into three industry groups, which it calls groves. Lyra Technology Group focuses on managed IT services. Pine Services Group brings together ERP software partners and consulting businesses. Cedar Solutions Group works in government technology services. Each has a particular market to understand; a government client and a small business buying IT support do not present identical operating problems.
For Totten, this arrangement poses a continuing test. A holding company must make belonging useful without making permission compulsory. Shared purchasing can help an independent business. A distant mandate can interrupt it. The distinction shows up in ordinary decisions, long before anyone draws a handsome organizational chart.
Autonomy comes with a scorecard
Totten's argument for decentralization is specific. Local CEOs run their own profit-and-loss statements. They make most decisions affecting customers and employees. Responsibility for results is visible, and empowerment depends on performance. The model requires leaders who want authority and can use it well.
His public explanation also allows for circumstances where centralization makes sense, including uniform products and certain markets where scale is decisive. He argues that technology services reward customer familiarity, local presence and quick decisions instead. That is a judgment about the businesses Evergreen buys, rather than a universal rule for managing every company.
The trade-off is worth keeping in view. More independent companies mean more places where decisions can go right or wrong. Totten is accepting that variation in exchange for proximity and ownership of outcomes. In a service business, the person who knows why a customer is unhappy may be more useful than the person authorized to standardize the response.
Learning to stop integrating
Evergreen's attachment to autonomy has been tested by experience. Totten has described an early acquisition built around aggressive integration that forced the firm to pause and stabilize. His later explanation of the model carries the weight of a choice that had to be revised.
He has also discussed acquisition diligence that paid too little attention to non-recurring revenue concentrated among a few customers. When that revenue fell after the deals closed, the weakness became apparent. Evergreen added an analysis to identify the concentration and decide whether more diligence, or passing on the business, was warranted.
Publishing mistakes makes them available for reuse, which is the point. A lesson confined to the people in one deal can expire when those people move on. A documented error can influence the next acquisition. The annual letter, in this telling, does some of the work of an institutional memory. Its least flattering pages may earn their keep.
Trust is a job, too
The leader pipeline is another expression of Totten's early experience. Evergreen's Executive Program recruits upcoming and recent MBA graduates for operating roles within its companies. It pairs responsibility with mentorship, coaching, resources and a community of other operators. The goal is to develop people through work that actually matters to a business.
That places a demand on the owner as well as the new executive. Delegation without support can become a convenient way to disappear. Support without authority can become a very elaborate supervision system. Evergreen promises both room to decide and people to consult. Whether a leader experiences that combination will depend on the daily behavior behind the program description.
Totten also looks outside his own organization for operating knowledge. Evergreen added TransDigm co-chief operating officer Patrick Murphy as an adviser, drawing on his experience with decentralized businesses. The arrangement gives its leaders access to someone who has worked on the same organizational problem at a different scale and in a different industry.
Many small experiments, one long horizon
AI has given Totten's model a fresh problem to solve. Evergreen describes more than 100 operating environments and roughly 6,000 employees as potential places to test ideas. People close to customers can identify a task worth changing, try a tool and reach their company leader without navigating a remote hierarchy.
In his writing on managed services, Totten describes a new AI-native operating company, three existing companies turned into AI labs and automation initiatives across the group. Examples include billing, quoting and accounts payable. Evergreen calls successful experiments bright spots; the holding company's role is to study them and help them spread, allowing other businesses to adopt what fits.
These are experiments in service delivery as much as technology. A useful result in one business may travel well; another may depend on a particular customer or workflow. Totten is betting that multiple teams can discover more than one central project. His ownership structure gives him places to test that proposition, and customers give those tests an audience with little patience for theory.
The mentor who never attended the meeting
Warren Buffett occupies an unusually personal place in Totten's story. Evergreen's account of his enthusiasm includes a Buffett ice sculpture at his wedding. Most guests have to settle for meeting the relatives. In a public thank-you letter, Totten said that he had never met Buffett, yet regarded him as a mentor and role model.
His lessons from Buffett concern reputation, compounding, choosing associates, preparation and long-term investment. In May 2026, he discussed another business story, Home Depot's Built from Scratch, on Investing by the Books. He was interested in what a national retailer could teach him about allowing people near customers to make decisions.
Totten's aspiration now reaches beyond his own tenure: a company that can outlast its founders by a century. That ambition brings the story back to time. The teenage photographer sold an image of something already over. The holding-company founder is buying businesses whose most consequential years, he hopes, are still ahead. Keeping them will be the work.