Alpine Investors

“That last Piece of actually improving the company you're buying is a tremendous amount of work, but it's also where all the alpha comes from.”

“We use the top grading process that GH smart popularized. And so you do this three hour plus interview with someone. And if the will to win doesn't pop out of that interview, they don't have it. And so it's people are like, how do you interview for that? It's …”

“And I realized, yeah, we're in a recession, but really the root cause in every single case was a person, the wrong person.”

“And we actually set a goal of delivering five X on every fund.”

“You actually make all your money by focusing on the bright spots and scaling the things that are going right. We've made 95% of our money by focusing on the things that are going well and scaling those until those crowd out the rest of the activities.”

“If we have a clear playbook about what we could do with an add-on, we think we can increase the EBITDA of this add-on by 50 to a hundred percent in the first 12 to 18 months because we've done the heavy lifting on all the elements of that playbook for that ind…”

“So the delta between our performance and median at some of our investors is paying for all the financial aid that they're going to do every year, paying for buildings, paying for scholarships.”

“I think to have a returns that are different, you have to have a belief that's different at the core. And our belief is that we can put a low experience, but high attribute person who's very young into an incredibly high senior leadership role. And in a short …”

“All of a sudden we're looking at all the deals that are coming into us through our intermediaries and basically zero of them are pitched to Us with no management team.”

“I pitched Doug Martin from the Stevens family that I had served on the board with when I was at the firm prior and done a really nice job for that company. And he observed that from being on the board from a company. So he was interested in backing me. And the…”

“So we have, 23 coaches that are in the Alpine ecosystem. And I think we've done over 500 coaching engagements over the last five or six years.”

“They still are really in over their heads for the first year or so, and they have to be a little patient. So it's not perfect, but it definitely gets them up to speed pretty quickly.”

“If I add up all those, I mean, we're putting probably somewhere between a hundred and a 150 MBAs into these companies per year.”

“This is very hard to do, but we bought companies that two to four times cashflow in our first one and lost money. So because we bought companies that had no barriers to entry, maybe they had customer concentration. They were trading at those multiples for a re…”

“So we probably lose about 10% really quickly because they worked in consulting. They thought they wanted to be a CEO. It turns out it's really hard to be a CEO. Maybe not for them. And then probably another 10% who either along the way decide it's not for them…”

“I mean, we want to be the number one performing private equity firm of our generation as measured by net MOIC, and almost every investment and people decision that we have is geared toward that.”

“There's a lot of private equity firms who go around and they basically do this math. They say, okay, a platform company trades at 15 times EBITDA and I can buy the add-ons at nine, so I'm gonna make money. It's fine. Lots of people do that. That exists in our …”

“Our deal flow when we made that change went down to zero because every deal that bankers send you. So we had a year where we had to rebuild our entire deal flow, our brand.”