Speaker

Tracy Britt Cool

Tracy Britt Cool

Co-founder and CEO of Kanbrick — a long-term investment partnership that buys and helps build mid-size businesses — and one of the few people to have crossed from Warren Buffett’s inner circle at Berkshire Hathaway into the operator’s chair as a chief executive.

Cool grew up the youngest of seven on a farm in Manhattan, Kansas, where a childhood produce stand taught her supply, demand, pricing, and hiring before she left for Harvard College and, straight after, Harvard Business School. A habit of writing letters to CEOs simply to learn — not to job-hunt — brought her into Buffett’s orbit, and she spent roughly a decade at Berkshire as his financial assistant, sitting on the boards of Berkshire companies including Benjamin Moore, Johns Manville, Dairy Queen, and Kraft Heinz. She then left the boardroom to run Pampered Chef as CEO, leading a multi-year turnaround of the declining direct-sales kitchenware business, before co-founding Kanbrick with Brian Humphrey. She is unusual in pairing an investor’s discipline with hard-won operating experience — the very combination she argues most investors lack.

Core positions

Cool holds that value is now created after a deal closes, not at it: capital has been commoditised, so returns must be built by operating, and advice from investors who have never operated rings hollow. She treats long-term thinking as a structural question rather than a slogan — a firm that must exit in three-to-five years will make short-term decisions whatever it claims — and Kanbrick’s permanent capital exists to remove that clock. She sequences every business as people, then purpose, then performance, insisting the ‘people calendar’ deserve the same discipline as the budget. She screens acquisitions on five M’s — moat, market, management, more potential, and margin of safety — reads quality through return on invested capital, and keeps leverage conservative so no financing decision can force a short-term move. Above all she carries Buffett’s lesson that capital allocation, done poorly, can ruin an otherwise good business, and that finance is a learnable language every leader should be equipped with.

In the wiki