News reached us over the weekend of a new trend in baseball. Apparently several Chicago Cubs relievers are applying copious amounts of perfume as a good luck charm. Turns out players from last year’s Kansas City Royals did the same thing. And they won the World Series. The Cubs manager tweeted, “Aroma still matters.” A…
So far in this special series we've examined the implications of lending to companies owned by private equity sponsors - and those that aren't. But there's a third category of owners that don't get much attention, and growing in importance.
So-called "fundless" sponsors - also called independent, or non-traditional sponsors - act as a hybrid of three parties. They combine the deal sourcing of investment bankers with the targeted allocation of capital by limited partners, and the expertise of GPs who perform a multitude of functions...
Given all the benefits of having a private equity firm as your partner, why would you even finance a company without one? We put that question to Brett Hickey, the CEO of Star Mountain Capital, who specializes in this sector. “There’s a lot of hype around non-sponsored transactions,” he told us. “It’s definitely buyer beware….
In our continuing special series on the value of private equity sponsors, we turn our attention to what motivates a family-run, privately-held, or even public company to sell to a private equity firm. On the face of it, it would seem challenging to convince businesses owned by families for decades to give up control to…
Last week we kicked off our special series examining the differences between lending to middle market companies and those backed by private equity sponsors [link]. We discussed how these companies often are founded by visionaries with great creativity, but lack the management skills to execute the business plan to its full potential. Let’s turn to…
Our discussion last week of the Fed’s confusing position on interest rates drew a number of favorable comments. “This is precisely right,” one reader wrote us. “They should just go ahead and raise rates. The more they delay, the tougher it’ll get.” But our reference to the economy as a “Goldilocks environment” left at least…
The thirteen-hour drive back from our North Carolina beach retreat afforded plenty of time to conjure up snappy post-Dodd Frank tourism slogans (“Welcome to the Outer Non-Banks!”) and spot amusing bumper stickers (“My Other Car is Driverless”). In general, though, our thoughts last week kept drifting back to the state of the capital markets as…
As we prepared this past weekend to escape the 95°F cauldron of Manhattan for the relief of the 98°F oven in the Outer Banks, our thoughts turned to which industries have proven to be the hottest so far this year. In terms of new issues for middle market sponsored transactions, healthcare has been the most…
Xavier University announced last week the installation of the nation’s first pizza ATM. The $55,000 machine’s capacity is 300 medium-sized pies a day, with orders taking three minutes from refrigerator to cardboard box serving. Preparation for the dining hall staff consisted of “40 hours of training each from a French chef.” Besides restoring our faith…
Call it an ironic twist. An actor named David Harbour, portraying Achilles in Shakespeare’s “Troilus and Cressida” in Central Park last week, ruptured his Achilles tendon in a fight scene. Mr. Harbour later tweeted, “I’m so method.” No word whether critics considered his final performance a stretch. Speaking of drama, the Fed elected not to…