NEW REPORTING: Sheehy Forgot to Mention the Family Money in His ‘Self-Made’ Success Story
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Friday, December 8, 2023
CONTACT
rehm@mtdems.org
Shady Sheehy claims he “bootstrapped” his company on the campaign trail – but conveniently omitted $600,000 in startup cash from his dad and brother
Helena, MT – On the campaign trail, multimillionaire Tim Sheehy tells the story of how he “bootstrapped” his company, Bridger Aerospace, building it “from scratch” without “freebies.” The truth is far different: What Sheehy doesn’t mention is he was given at least $600,000 in startup money from his dad and brother, according to new reporting from the Daily Beast. And his brother’s extensive Wall Street ties paved the way for Bridger Aerospace’s first government contract.
Sheehy has also claimed that he lived in a tent “for months” to “underscore [...] how broke” he and his wife were while building his company. But in his upcoming memoir, he admits that he “could easily have moved into a pleasant enough place in Bozeman” and afforded comfortable accommodations.
Read more about Sheehy’s omissions below:
Daily Beast: GOP Star Tim Sheehy Forgot to Mention the Family Money in His ‘Self-Made’ Success Story
By Sam Brodey
December 8, 2023
Talking to party luncheons and interviewers, Sheehy’s success story about Bridger Aerospace has sounded like a gritty start-up tale that began with a dream and some savings, not “freebies,” as he put it in a podcast interview.
But fresh information has emerged that undercuts Sheehy’s story of self-made scrappiness. And the details come from an unlikely source: Sheehy himself.
In a forthcoming memoir to be released this month, titled Mudslingers: A True Story of American Firefighting, Sheehy divulges the hard work and determination that went into building Bridger Aerospace. But he also details the extensive financial support from his family that made its success possible.
While Sheehy and his wife had $300,000 in savings as seed capital for the enterprise he dreamed up in the early 2010s, he called his parents and asked for $100,000 which they had set aside for his college education.
Later, in 2015, the company was hard-pressed to find the $500,000 needed to purchase their first two airplanes. “I didn’t have half a million dollars,” Sheehy wrote. “We were doing everything on our own. And I needed help. As I had when I first started the business, I turned to my family.”
While Sheehy writes that he worked out a deal to pay the seller some share of funds up front and the rest in quarterly installments, it’s clear that his father and brother provided the cash needed to seal the deal.
In telling his story, Sheehy often mentions that he and his wife lived in a “tent” for a period after moving to Montana, an evocative detail that underscores how much money they had sunk into the company and how broke they were. “Again, this is just true, every dollar we had, we poured into our company,” he said in a September meet and greet. “We literally lived in a tent in our barn for a few years.”
But in Mudslingers, Sheehy reveals that he and his wife “could easily have moved into a pleasant enough place in Bozeman, thrown ourselves into raising a family and growing a business, figuring ‘someday, when we’re ready, we’ll buy some land and build a place in the country.’” Living in a tent, then, was more of a lifestyle decision to commit to “the life we dreamed of” on a farmstead, not because they had literally no money.
If Sheehy is hoping that talking up his start-up story will propel him to electoral success, however, his own memoir is having the ironic effect of revealing some cracks in that story.
[Bridger Aerospace] does extensive business with the federal government; in 2018, the company’s first lucrative contract was awarded by the U.S. Department of Interior that was then run by Sheehy’s friend and fellow Montanan, Ryan Zinke.
One major figure in the book is Sheehy’s brother, Matt. At one point, he writes, “I owe almost all of my business success to my brother, Matt, and have learned countless lessons from him since I was a baby.”
Matt Sheehy, who is six years older than Tim, has extensive financial industry experience, including stints at private equity and venture capital firms. He appears to have been instrumental in Bridger securing a deal with the powerful Wall Street firm the Blackstone Group to fund a $200 million acquisition of Super Scooper planes—a move that teed up Bridger’s first big federal contract.
“As I discovered throughout this process, it’s almost impossible to enter the U.S. aerial firefighting market unless you are already in it or are an exceptionally wealthy family or individual,” Sheehy writes. “My brother and our finance lead, McAndrew Rudisill, eventually found our partner in the Blackstone Group.”
On the campaign trail, that same candor about what it took for Sheehy to launch Bridger has not always been on display.
At several events and in several interviews, Sheehy has repeatedly said that he built the company from “scratch,” returning often to the “bootstrap” imagery.
“When I got out, my wife and I spent every dollar we had, and with a couple of other veterans, we started our business,” Sheehy said at a September fundraiser. “And it was a pure startup bootstrap, every cent we had. And we probably wouldn't have made it if there wasn't a handful of folks in our community that said, ‘Hey, you know, you're a veteran-founded business, you guys served our country, and we're going to help you.’”
Indeed, a voter listening to Sheehy’s remarks might be left with the distinct impression that he got no outside help whatsoever to start the company.
“We started our company in my barn and just me and my co-founder, all veteran founding team,” Sheehy said at an August meet and greet. “And it was every cent we had from the military that we’d saved up and we bought one old plane from the government and developed a sensor software system to map wildfires. And then we bootstrapped it from there to create about 450 jobs, one job at a time.”
In Montana, a state that favors wealthy self-made businessmen—like its governor, Greg Gianforte—and farmers—like Tester—Sheehy appears well aware of the value of a bootstrapping brand.
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