# The Built to Be Bought Series: All Seventeen Pieces, in Reading Order A reading guide to the whole series on how cleared government contractors get built, sold, and rolled: the playbook, the operating partners, the SEC filings, the fund structure, and the founder on-ramps. Author: J.A. Watte Published: July 7, 2026 Source: https://jwatte.com/blog/built-to-be-bought-series-index/ --- This series follows one machine: how a small cleared government contractor gets built, sold, and rolled into something larger, and how the people and private equity firms around it get paid. It grew into seventeen pieces, all sourced to public records, and this is the map. Read it top to bottom for the full arc, or jump to the part you need. Every article stands on its own. ## Start here: the playbook 1. [Built to Be Bought](/blog/built-to-be-bought/). The whole thesis in one essay: the "book of business" a buyer actually pays for, the roll-up math, the second bite of the apple, the tax treatment, and why the smart founders keep their equity compounding instead of cashing out. If you read only one, read this. ## For a founder starting out 2. [One Playbook, Many Starting Hands](/blog/cleared-veteran-disabled-minority-govcon-playbook/). How a founder of any background gets onto the first rung: a cleared non-veteran, a veteran, a service-disabled minority veteran, a woman owner, a tribal-owned firm, and a U.S. citizen with no experience at all. The certifications and how they stack, the free help through APEX Accelerators, the Mentor-Protege Program, reverse mentorship, the other avenues like SBIR and the GSA Schedule, and the rules that quietly decide who wins. ## The people who run it: the operating-partner bench These are the twelve operating partners and advisors a defense private equity firm keeps on hand, and the specific credential that earned each one the seat. They sort into three doors. The founders who built a company and sold it: 3. [Thomas Churbuck](/blog/thomas-churbuck-power-systems-manufacturing/) built a turbine-parts company and sold it twice. 4. [Wayne Garrett](/blog/wayne-garrett-psm-cfo/) co-founded that same company as its finance chief. 5. [Les Daniels](/blog/les-daniels-cai-turbocombustor/), the financier who has been the firm's aerospace co-investor for twenty years. The executives who ran a very large business: 6. [Peter Cannito](/blog/peter-cannito-polaris-alpha-redwire/) tripled Polaris Alpha, sold it, and now runs Redwire. 7. [Marc Duvall](/blog/marc-duvall-collins-aerostructures/) ran a five-billion-dollar aerospace division. 8. [Mano Nazar](/blog/mano-nazar-nuclear-operating-partner/) ran a nuclear fleet. 9. [Bill Boisture](/blog/bill-boisture-hawker-beechcraft/) ran Gulfstream, NetJets, and Hawker Beechcraft. 10. [Paul Fulchino](/blog/paul-fulchino-aviall-boeing/) grew Aviall and sold it to Boeing. 11. [Gary Mercer](/blog/gary-mercer-ge-aviation/) spent thirty-six years engineering GE's jet engines. The leaders who held the top of a command: 12. [Jim McConville](/blog/jim-mcconville-army-chief-of-staff/), the Army's fortieth Chief of Staff. 13. [Andy Boyd](/blog/andy-boyd-cia-to-operating-partner/), the former director of the CIA's cyber center. ## How they get paid, and where the money lives 14. [How a Defense PE Firm Gets Paid](/blog/ae-partners-equity-stakes-sec-filings/). The equity stakes, read straight from the SEC filings of BigBear.ai, Redwire, and Firefly: the fund's controlling positions, the director shares, the tell that firm-employed directors assign their pay back to the firm, and the related-party deal a firm ran between two companies it owned. 15. [The Plumbing: The Funds, LPs, and Holding Companies Behind the Deals](/blog/pe-funds-lps-and-holding-companies/). Where the money actually lives: the management company, the general partner, and the fund limited partnership full of pension money, plus the chain of holding shells that houses each deal, and the rival firms (Veritas, Arlington, Carlyle) that run the identical structure. ## The whole machine in one company 16. [York Space Systems: From a Billion-Dollar Buyout to a $4.75 Billion IPO](/blog/york-space-systems-ae-industrial/). A single company that shows the entire arc in three years, bought at about one billion, grown into the Space Development Agency's largest satellite supplier, and taken public at nearly five, with the firm still holding a quarter of it. ## Where the capital sits 17. [Why a National-Security Investor Sits in Boca Raton, Not the Beltway](/blog/why-defense-pe-boca-raton-not-beltway/). Almost everything in government contracting points at Washington, so why does one of the busiest national-security investors run its portfolio from Florida? The GE roots, the tax math, and the Beltway office it opened anyway. ## What to take from it The through line under all seventeen is the lesson this site keeps finding: there are three ways to be paid, and they are not equal. A salary pays you for your time. Owning a company pays you for the business, once. Holding equity in something larger, a platform, a fund, a share of the carry, pays you for value that other people create, and it compounds. The whole series is that single idea, followed through the cleared, documented, and very well-plumbed world of people who happen to hold a security clearance. *This series is informational and journalistic, describing publicly reported companies, people, programs, and transactions. It is not investment, tax, legal, or M&A advice. All third parties are discussed from public records and their own published statements as nominative fair use, with no affiliation implied and nothing endorsed by them.* --- Canonical HTML: https://jwatte.com/blog/built-to-be-bought-series-index/ RSS: https://jwatte.com/feed.xml JSON Feed: https://jwatte.com/feed.json Hero image: https://jwatte.com/images/built-to-be-bought-series-index.webp