Alex Behring’s Long Game: Why He’s Happy to Hold a Business for Fifteen Years or More

In 2010, Alex Behring and his partners at 3G Capital acquired Burger King for approximately one billion dollars of equity. Fifteen years later, the firm is still holding its position in Restaurant Brands International, the company that Burger King became. The investment has returned approximately 30 times the original equity. The decision not to exit has compounded that return further.

For most private equity investors, a 30x return would be the end of the story. Take the gain, return capital to investors, and move to the next deal. For Alex Behring, staying is often the point. The long game is not a fallback when exits are unavailable. It is the strategy, the deliberate, structurally supported choice to hold great businesses for as long as they keep producing, rather than selling at the moment of peak value realisation.

As the Colossus profile “Built to Own” documents, and as Behring explained in his conversation with Patrick O’Shaughnessy on the Invest Like the Best podcast, this approach is not passive. It requires a specific kind of capital structure, a specific kind of investor, and a specific kind of patience that most of the investment industry is not designed to support.

The Railroad That Built the Habit

The roots of Alex Behring’s long-game thinking run back further than Burger King. When he was 30 years old, 3G Capital’s co-founders gave him the opportunity to run América Latina Logística (ALL), the largest rail and logistics company in Latin America. The business was in difficult shape. Its customers wanted to use it and couldn’t, because the service wasn’t good enough.

Behring’s response was to put on overalls and spend a week at a time driving trains across the country. He got close to the engineers who ran the locomotives. He learned that their cabins were cold, their seats were painful for eight-hour shifts, and their dormitories between changeovers were in poor condition. None of this was expensive to fix. He fixed it. The goodwill that produced gave him the platform to introduce an onboard computer system that ranked every engineer nationwide on their fuel efficiency and safety performance.

“Railroaders are very proud people,” Behring recalled. The rankings drove a 30% reduction in fuel costs the company’s single largest expense and a significant improvement in asset utilisation across the network.

The lesson he took from that experience was not a playbook for railroads. It was a principle about how value is created in any business: through genuine operational involvement, through understanding the people doing the actual work, through the long accumulation of small improvements that only become visible over years. You do not build that kind of value and then sell it. You hold it.

Fifteen Years with Restaurant Brands International

The RBI investment is the clearest demonstration of what Alex Behring’s long game produces. When 3G Capital acquired Burger King in 2010, it was a struggling brand with roughly 12,000 restaurants, an underperforming franchise system, and an EBITDA margin that was being consumed by unnecessary corporate overhead. Behring, serving as executive chairman, supported Schwartz as CEO in rebuilding the business from the ground up.

In the years that followed, the firm did not flip the investment at the first sign of strong performance. They acquired Tim Hortons in 2014, creating Restaurant Brands International. They added Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen in 2017 and Firehouse Subs in 2021. System-wide sales grew from a few billion dollars to more than 45 billion. The restaurant count grew from 12,000 to more than 33,000 across over 120 countries.

As Forbes contributor Hank Tucker has reported, the return on that original equity investment is approximately 30 times. 3G Capital is still invested.

France: When the Long Game Costs Before It Pays

The France story inside Burger King illustrates something that short-term investors cannot afford to do: invest heavily in a market for years before the investment pays back.

When 3G Capital acquired Burger King, the brand had essentially zero presence in France despite it being one of the world’s best burger markets. The firm identified the opportunity, found an exceptional local partner in Olivier Bertrand, and began building from a single restaurant in the south of France.

The early years required significant capital and management attention for returns that would not materialise for a long time. Behring described the calculus directly: “You only do that if you’re taking a long-term view. And so even though it wouldn’t pay back in the next six months or a year, or a few years, we knew if we’re going to be long-term owners of this business fast forward, 10–15 years, we’ll be well-off.” Today, France is the second largest market for Burger King globally, generating more than 2 billion euros in annual sales.

Why the Market Can’t Replicate This

The long game at 3G Capital is not a philosophy that can be grafted onto a conventional fund structure. It requires specific architectural support.

The investor base must be willing to stay invested. 3G Capital has deliberately built its investor base around mostly family offices and selected institutions.

The partners must have their own capital at stake. At 3G Capital, the partners are the largest investors in every fund. Staying invested when the business is still compounding is the rational choice because it is also the most lucrative one.

And the firm must be willing to do nothing when there is nothing worth buying. Behring observed in the podcast that the current investment environment with stretched valuations and abundant capital is not the easiest he has seen. But he also noted: “It was always, always, very difficult to buy a great business at a fair price, regardless of what was going on in the world or whatever time period it was.”

The long game is not a response to market conditions. It is Alex Behring’s answer to the permanent difficulty of finding something worth owning. When you find it, you hold it. That is the strategy.