Investing hundreds of millions of dollars of private-equity capital is not what you would expect a goat-farming business to do. However, Tucker’s Farm Corporation is not your typical farm.

Launched by James Tucker as small goat dairy in 1994, the farm at Hungry Bay in Paget has about 20 Nubian half-pygmy goats and produces locally renowned goat’s cheese.

The business moved into a higher gear when James’s son, Kyle Tucker, returned home from New York in 2020 after experience in the world of high finance with Apollo Global Management, a top private-equity firm, and Viking Global Investors, a prominent hedge fund.

Kyle Tucker had a vision for investing in a different way from Wall Street’s private-equity giants. He wanted his new company to invest in smaller mid-sized businesses, across a wide range of industries, with a long-term investment horizon.

He told The Royal Gazette: “I asked my dad if I could use his brand as the parent, and he said, ‘You don’t know anything about goat farming.’ I said, ‘I don’t need to, I only need the brand.’

“I wanted the brand to embody the aesthetic of Berkshire Hathaway, to be a little ‘softer’ and longer term in our investment approach.”

As Mr Tucker, 36, once put it in a LinkedIn post: “To me there’s something aesthetic (and funny) about a private-equity firm inside a goat dairy.”

James Tucker was perplexed when his son returned from New York. He recalled: “I said bye, why you want to leave Wall Street for a dairy with 20 goats? And he said, ‘Pops you don’t get it - it’s not a goat farm any more, it’s a rocket ship. Get in the back seat and buckle up’.”

Kyle Tucker draws inspiration from the “folksy”, value-focused conglomerates based far from Wall Street, including Nebraska-based Berkshire and Kansas-headquartered Koch, Inc. Their approach is his “north star”, he says.

In particular, he admires Warren Buffett, the celebrated investor who took control of Berkshire in 1965, when it was a struggling New England textile manufacturer, and led its growth into a conglomerate with assets of $1.22 trillion, as of the end of 2025.

Three of the Buffett principles that help to guide Mr Tucker’s approach are discipline on price, opportunism and patience. Like Berkshire, Tucker’s Farm has a broad outlook, seeking opportunities across multiple industries.

Mr Tucker’s aim is not to sell at a higher price in a short space of time. The average holding period of a stock for an institutional investor is about two years, while private-equity firms tend to keep their investments for between three and seven years, research by Bain & Co suggests.

Tucker’s Farm takes a different approach. “We look at our investments over a ten to 20-plus-year period,” Mr Tucker said. “Specifically, how do we grow the profitability, the cashflow of that company over the long term?

“We don’t care about employee counts. We don’t care about revenue. We’re really focused on free cashflow per share.”

Free cashflow is the money a business generates after paying its operating costs and making necessary investments.

Tucker’s Farm is structured as a holding vehicle — not a fund. Its investors include insurance companies, an endowment manager and family offices.

The ambition is to invest between $100 million and $200 million in acquisitions annually, although opportunities determine the actual pace.

Over time, Mr Tucker wants to develop a structure that allows cash generated by the businesses it holds to fund new opportunities.

His focus is on acquiring smaller businesses with purchase prices in the range of $20 million to $40 million. Smaller enterprises can command substantially lower valuations than the larger companies that interest Wall Street investors, he said, because there are fewer buyers in the market.

However that premium has to be earned, through finding and assessing suitable targets, recruiting management as necessary and integrating the acquisitions.

“Ironically, it’s easier to buy something big than to buy a lot of small things,” he said.

Finding those businesses is central to the operation. A team of 15 searches full-time, making calls, sending messages, attending conferences and cultivating relationships with brokers across the United States.

The team considers about 500 deals a week. Opportunities come through business-sale websites, intermediaries and sometimes direct approaches to owners who may never have considered selling.

Once a potential acquisition enters the system, a bespoke underwriting process, supported by artificial intelligence, helps assess the business and determine an acceptable price.

While the rigorous selection process may give Tucker’s Farm an edge over competing investors today, Mr Tucker said AI could help others catch up in time. His team’s more durable competitive advantage is the ability to source deals, he said.

“If you’re a hedge fund and you're picking stocks, you’re dealing with the same information and opportunities as everybody else,” he said. “So, it’s very hard to have edge in that business.

“In our world, we’re buying these businesses that are not traded on a stock exchange. Where we can create value is in how effectively we go out and find stuff.”

Mr Tucker, who was last year named one of PE Hub’s “Dealmakers to Watch”, has led the steady build-up of the business through acquisition of businesses such as Soccer 5, an operator of football facilities, Pizza Factory, a quick-service restaurant franchisor, and Christmas Decor, a US franchisor of exterior Christmas decorating services.

This month, Tucker’s Farm announced it had raised $60 million in seed capital — in the space of three weeks — for Teddy AI, a platform incubated by Tucker’s Farm for the aggregation of compliance and client-focused legal services. Teddy AI has passed the $25 million revenue milestone and is growing quickly.

Another example of “roll-up” investing, the aggregation of smaller businesses in a fragmented industry, is the Badlands Security Company, capitalised last year by Tucker’s Farm.

Badlands, which is focused on acquiring and growing security and locksmith operators in the US Northeast, recently purchased Cosmic Fischer, a New York commercial security integrator that has been in business since 1968.

AI, as well as helping with Tucker’s Farm’s deal selection process, also influences the prospects of acquisition targets.

Mr Tucker divides businesses into four categories: AI beneficiaries, those resilient to AI disruption, those threatened by AI disruption and those whose prospects remain unclear.

Potential beneficiaries include suppliers to data centres and parts of the biotechnology industry. Resilient businesses include plumbing and services requiring sensitive human interaction. Experiences, property and strong brands can also offer protection, he believes.

Information businesses face greater risks. He recalled once considering acquiring a recipe subscription business that was generating $5 million in annual cashflow, but opted against because of the business model’s vulnerability to AI. That was three years ago. Recently, he learnt that the company’s annual cashflow has since plunged to $35,000.

Accounting falls into the uncertain category: AI could improve an acquired firm’s efficiency, but a technology competitor might develop a better service and take its clients.

In his own business, Mr Tucker sees relationships, sourcing systems and a recognisable brand as AI-resilient characteristics.

He feel fortunate to have been influenced by the diverse qualities of his parents — the creativity, craftsmanship and indepdendent-mindedness of his artisanal cheesemaker father, and the numeracy, discipline and work ethic of his accountant mother, Judith Howe-Tucker

Bermuda is central to the life he wanted to build. A Warwick Academy alumnus, he values friendships that stretch back to childhood and all the traditions of home such as Cup Match, Bermuda Day and barbecues. His wife, Annie Outerbridge, is also Bermudian.

As he once stated in a LinkedIn post, when he returns from the hurly burly of New York, “I land in the motherland (Bermuda) and hit the airport Causeway on my moped and the anxiety and conventionality dissipates. And this is a good thing!”

He added: “I value the small town life of Bermuda.”

• For more information about Tucker’s farm, visitwww.tuckersfarm.com