PE4FAMs Blog

My daughter is a Managing Director at Cambridge Associates (CA) in Boston and she told me about a study that CA had recently completed for its clients on  strategies to leverage relationships with PE sponsors for “no fee, no carry” co-investment opportunities. CA’s study shows a dramatic outperformance of “all in” co-investment strategies over the base […]

Dick and I have been working on a transaction for the last two months that involves a service business. One of its most critical assets is relationships between the provider and its customers. We have utilized a third party marketing firm with technical expertise in financial services to help us validate the strength of the

In a recent Wall Street Journal article by Andy Kessler dated March 29, 2015 entitled “The Glory Days of Private Equity Are Over” (read here) Mr. Kessler, an accomplished author, investment banker, research analyst, venture capitalist and hedge fund manager, makes an impassioned case for why macro trends will bury the private equity business model. His

In our last blog I wrote about the mutual fund industry creating two kinds of funds; retail and prime and non-prime institutional. Institutional funds would have a fluctuating NAV and could carry liquidity constraints called “gates” unless the underlying assets were government or agency securities. Now Deposits May Require Fees Last week the Wall Street

Over the years I have learned that the real news begins in the back pages of every newspaper, especially The Wall Street Journal. Therefore, I was not surprised to find on page C8 of the February 6, 2015 Wall Street Journal an article about how changes in money market mutual funds will be bad for

Private Equity firms fashion themselves as pretty good students of relative value. While managers may have different investment styles from deep value and relative value, to growth at a reasonable price and straight growth, they all understand the nuances of valuation. For example, as a value investor we have set our benchmarks to tell us

Happy New Year! PE4Fams has not been slacking in the New Year … just busy with multiple opportunities to grow our portfolio companies and acquire some new platforms. Over the last 30 days our team has been conducting all kinds of due diligence from quality of earnings to customer interviews and market surveys. In varying

As lifelong Cleveland Browns fans, the private equity team at CapitalWorks has shared the collective angst of the City regarding the demotion of Brian Hoyer and the fumbled handoff to Johnny Manzel. We have seen this play before – 18 times before – and we all know how it ends. Bernie Kosar has taken some

We have seen many signs of re-shoring in our portfolio companies. Some of that trend is a function of China suppliers re-prioritizing their manufacturing focus towards high unit volumes where they can justify capital investment in productivity enhancing technologies. Niche manufacturers, like our fractional horsepower AC/DC motor business, have lower unit volumes and seem to

Recent financial news is full of warnings about a slowdown in worldwide growth. From Wal-Mart and AT&T, to IBM and Target, it appears that same store sales and unit growth are challenged. This is amazing to me in light of the highly stimulative policies employed by central banks around the world from Japan, to China,