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# Buy the Business, Then Earn the Adoption
- URL: https://www.signalful.com/buy-the-business-then-earn-the-adoption/
- Published: 2026-10-03T13:49:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-09T19:40:13.000Z
- Description: Long Lake bought nearly 40 service businesses in three years, then agreed to take Amex Global Business Travel private for $6.3 billion.
- Author: Signalful Editorial
- Tags: Investors, Long Lake, Alexander Taubman, Private Equity, AI Strategy, #sf-0014, #yt-w3-nMklTFjY, #Import 2026-10-06 15:50

Alexander Taubman is co-founder and CEO of Long Lake, a 3-year-old company that buys established service businesses and deploys AI inside them. Long Lake has acquired close to 40 companies across HOA management, HR services, specialty tax, infrastructure services and now travel, where it agreed to take American Express Global Business Travel private for $6.3 billion. Before Long Lake, Taubman started in Goldman Sachs's Special Situations Group and spent almost 10 years at Oaktree working with Howard Marks and Bruce Karsh. On nights and weekends he helped build his family's investment office, which did close to 50 deals with founder-owned companies. He grew up in Michigan in a family of real estate entrepreneurs, and the company takes its name from Long Lake Road, where the family business was based for 40 or 50 years. These signals are from Taubman's interview with David Senra on David Senra's podcast.

1. **The Diffusion Problem.** The models went from failing at addition to solving famous unsolved math problems in about 4 years, and the economy still looks mostly the same. Taubman blames legacy systems, legacy data, messy workflows and change management, which make deployment at scale "actually really hard." He also ties it to financing: trillions of dollars spent scaling models only pay off if someone produces returns in the real economy. Long Lake generates that ROI and sends cash back into the system, which Senra summed up as Long Lake being distribution for the labs.
2. **More Productive, More Hires.** Long Lake is adding headcount in its oldest vertical, HOA management, where it has bought 20-plus companies. Taubman's logic: if each person handles 50% more clients with better service, customers stay longer, the business grows faster, and each employee is worth more. "If you have a salesperson with AI that's now doing 3x quota, do you want to have like one-third the sales people?" He calls the model positive-sum and rejects the PE playbook of buying companies and cutting staff.
3. **The Amex GBT Deal.** American Express started the business in 1915 to get its Travelers Cheque customers out of Europe during World War I. Today it manages travel for close to half the Fortune 500 and many governments and militaries. Taubman cites high-90s logo retention, more than 100% dollar retention, and an average 15-year relationship with its top couple hundred customers. Travel is a small cost and mission-critical: when a team is stranded in a Chicago snowstorm at 2 a.m., someone has to pick up the phone and know what to do.
4. **The Prepared Mind.** Long Lake keeps a force-ranked list of its top 15 to 20 industries and re-ranks it as it learns. Its sourcing team sees 4,000 to 5,000 deals a year, and the company enters only 1 or 2 new industries a year. Travel sat on the whiteboard for about a year before the Amex deal. Taubman borrows Buffett's line that you double your chances of getting a date if you're open to more options, so staying open to 20 industries makes a great business and team more likely to turn up.
5. **The Shared 70%.** Nexus, Long Lake's horizontal AI platform, shares 70 to 80% of its infrastructure across verticals: model routing, security and agent orchestration. It is model-agnostic and sometimes uses several models for a single task. The last 20 to 30% means mapping each business's workflows and connecting to its systems, and Taubman says that part takes a world-class AI team. Every new industry adds capabilities that make Nexus better for all the others, which is why he thinks scale matters more with AI.
6. **Engineers in the Field.** Taubman estimates 70% of Long Lake's engineers are sitting with frontline team members across 15 to 20 states, working on that last 20%. They watch what breaks, what helps and what doesn't, then iterate. The models are Kelly Johnson's Skunk Works, where engineers sat in the factory, and Danaher's motto of "common sense rigorously applied." Long Lake hires engineers who could raise venture money for their own startups, because adapting a 100-year-old company's data and systems is a hard technical problem.
7. **The Email Dividend.** In HOA management, much of the work happens in long emails. A board asking for a snow removal vendor needs pricing, reviews and schedules pulled from other communities and vendors, and a good reply takes 45 minutes to an hour. Nexus drafts it overnight at about 99% accuracy, and the manager edits it in 5 or 10 minutes, now increasingly in their own voice. About 55% of inbound travel-agent queries arrive by email, so Taubman expects that HOA tool to affect Amex GBT on day one.
8. **Owners, Not Vendors.** Long Lake turns down investors who want to license Nexus. Taubman's objection: "the problem with selling software is you don't actually care about what happens in the outcome." He wants to change how industries operate, and he thinks that requires owning and operating the company. Building the platform and deploying it only into Long Lake's own companies keeps the incentives pointed at growth, customer experience, higher pay and shareholder returns.
9. **No Forced Adoption.** Owning the company does not mean mandating the tools. "If we have to force someone to use our Nexus platform, then the platform is not good enough." Long Lake treats its 30,000 employees as its customers and design partners, and the goal is a product good enough to spread inside the company by word of mouth. Activating a cohort used to take about 6 months and now takes days. Taubman connects this to his grandfather's threshold resistance idea from retail design, where a step as small as half a stair at the entrance cuts how many shoppers walk in.
10. **High Bar Everywhere.** Long Lake itself has only about 55 people, roughly 90% AI engineers, operators and deployment staff and 10% M&A and finance, and expects to reach about 100 by year end. This quarter it hired about 3% of close to 1,000 applicants, and about 75% of hires come from referrals. Taubman says the work needs 3 things done at a world-class level: buying companies well, building technology that rivals the labs, and change management. The hiring rule is that every new person has to raise the team's average.
11. **Self-Funding Compounder.** Long Lake expects more than $4 billion in revenue next year, including Amex GBT, from businesses with roughly 100% dollar retention. Taubman buys only established companies already earning 20 to 25%-plus EBITDA margins, avoids heavy leverage, and says Long Lake "never need\[s\] to raise capital again." It has never sold a company and doesn't plan to, and it is not a seller itself. He still sees going public as the most ambitious path, because a long record of execution earns a stock that trades at a lower cost of capital, as Henry Singleton and John Malone showed.
12. **Post-AGI Dispersion.** Taubman calls first-principles thinking about why a business will still be great after AGI possibly the most important question in capital allocation right now. He expects winners in high-quality services to become orders of magnitude more valuable, while low-value businesses that act "more of like a tax" disappear. The upside math is simple compounding: triple the value of the businesses every 5 years for 20 years and Long Lake becomes a trillion-dollar company. He follows Singleton's habit of steering the boat a little every day, and points out that travel was never in the original plan.

Watch the full video at [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3-nMklTFjY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3-nMklTFjY&ref=signalful.com).