Sycamore Partners

“And we did it last year with a company that we bought called Acena, where we took a position and bought 10 or 15% of the debt. We were part of the credit syndicate that led the company into bankruptcy. We then acquired the company from all the other credit inv…”

“We believe that companies are organisms, that have their own life cycles. They grow, they mature, they decline, they get sick, they get better. They're a series of things, and they have their own life, and candidly, chief executives or management teams also ha…”

“We need to have active participation in the distressed credit markets to be able to take control of companies at an earlier stage because they are not being sold in bankruptcies. They're being bought pre-bankruptcy.”

“Many of the mistakes that are made are when people either confuse a distributor for a brand, leaving aside some of our own missteps in this area, but department stores valued as brands, when in fact they were distributors, as an example, and not thinking of th…”

“In the absence of having that close relationship with someone who is going to lead the company and who we feel is just right, we have not always chosen to take risk on just an asset or just a company where the company's fine, or maybe the company's terrific, b…”

“The vast majority, 65% of the sales and 75 or 80% of the profits were really a B to B services company that was a logistics company, to be Alcorant, that delivered two hundred million packages a year overnight to the Fortune 1000.”

“EBITDA, when we acquired the two companies together, was about 65. We did it as a traditional LBO. We invested two hundred and fifty million dollars, and based on the market value of those two companies today, which we still own, one has gone public, the other…”

“Candidly, the single largest investment regret I have is having traditionally been a value investor, not having recognized the power of growth over the last five years. And pivoting our portfolio to embrace those models at what appeared to me to be relatively …”

“This year, Staples retail stores will have the same two hundred million of profitability that they had four years ago when everyone forecasted zero, and that is still in a pandemic where we're underperforming.”