E179: How UCLA's Endowment Wins in Private Equity w/Deputy CIO Michael Marvelli

So, tell me about how you came to be the deputy CIO at UCLA Investment Company.

It took

all of 20 years or so.

I've been at UCLA 22 years.

When I joined, we were a 400 to 500 million dollar pool of capital.

We've grown about 10x

over the course of my time here, and that's after distributing to the campus

an amount that would equal three to four times the capital base which when I joined so it's been a rewarding experience today I spend most of my time in the private markets and outside of my investment duties I get involved in asset allocation

as well as working on our annual spending policy.

So you were at the endowment when you launched in 2011 and it became its own entity.

Tell me about how that launch happened.

In the wake of the great financial crisis,

we had

sort of resurrected AUM just above a billion dollars.

We were more than twice the size of when I joined.

The portfolio was also a lot more complex because we had pushed into alternatives.

And

we wanted to pause at that point and ask ourselves

what structure would serve us best long term

as we thought about growing the endowment from there.

And that's when we decided to set up a proper management company

in 2011.

It's now been an independent management company.

for 14 years.

How has the strategy evolved across those 14 years?

There were three of us at launch

and now there are 15 professionals.

So you can, as you can imagine, you can do quite a bit more with that level of resource.

We can just take a much more nuanced view of asset class strategy.

And,

you know, frankly, that's where I'd like to focus a lot of our time today is

on formulation of asset class strategy because I don't think

enough time is spent on that topic.

A famous pension fund study showed that 90%, 9-0 of the returns were due to the portfolio construction and only 10% to manager selection.

Do you think that still holds today?

I don't know about the percentages, but asset allocation absolutely drives the returns,

particularly in endowment land where

the less liquid

pools of capital have outperformed over long periods of time.

So here we're talking about asset allocation.

And then what I would say is the asset class strategy is

the

next determinant of performance, followed by manager selection.

There's three layers.

There's portfolio construction, asset class strategy, and manager selection.

So let's talk about that middle layer.

What is asset class strategy?

We might use the

lower middle middle market in private equity to

illustrate that.

But I would say that a lot of

endowments,

they'll arrive at some

asset allocation target, and then they'll just hunt for the best managers.

In my view,

unless you're...

you're focused on the right segments within the asset class,

you can be the best manager

selector in the world,

and your performance might be good, but it's going to be suboptimal.

So the piece that's missing is the strategy.

You said something that I want to double-click on.

So what does it mean to have good manager selection and bad asset allocation strategy?

Give me an example of that.

Well, if you don't have

a specific strategy and you're not targeting particular segments within an asset class,

then you're just left with finding the best managers

available.

And so, if you're hunting in

the

most prevalent segments of the private equity market, say the middle market and

the upper market,

there's a lot of really bright people and great teams that can, you know,

talk a good story.

They can walk you through a very rational sort of model of how they invest.

And you're left

thinking that

this is a high-quality group.

They would be great stewards of our capital.

And

then you select on that basis.

And

my point is that you could end up with a bunch of, you know, quote, high quality firms, you know, of competent people,

but you're going to be exposed to the segments of the market that they're investing in.

And those might offer good returns, but they may not offer the best returns.

You mentioned private equity.

You have upper middle market.

core middle market, lower middle market, and venture, you might have growth or

traditional venture, and then pre-seed and seed.

And it's before you even pick which manager, picking what part of that market makes most sense as an overall portfolio strategy.

In my opinion, it's very important to do that.

And it's not just that there's a right or wrong answer, although you would probably argue in private equity, there is one.

There's also a portfolio construction question, which is what is your overall diversification of your portfolio?

Perhaps there's tech strategy if you're just a regular high net worth investor, not an endowment investor.

There's other factors beyond just picking the right answer.

You're certainly

wanting to consider how

the strategy is going to fit within the overall context of your portfolio.

And as an endowment,

it's a multi-asset, globally diversified portfolio.

And so you're really looking for private equity and venture you know, to drive returns.

You're shooting for high returns.

Whereas in other asset classes, you might be seeking diversifiers or strategies that might hedge against inflation,

or in the case of cash and fixed income, to provide liquidity to a fairly illiquid pool of capital.

So yeah, all these asset classes have a role to play.

And the role for private equity and venture is to help increase returns.

So you love the lower middle market of PE.

Before we go into why, how do you define lower middle market?

What does that exactly mean?

This is a great question.

And there is no consensus.

So

you'll find people

talking about sub-billion dollar funds or sub

$300 million funds or

you'll hear people talk in terms of EBITDA levels.

To be a little bit provocative, it doesn't really matter in the end.

I guess it matters from the sense that a label helps one

talk about

what's important about the market.

But what I would say is it's much more

important to think about it philosophically and what it means

in terms of strategic value.

And,

you know, allow me to kind of expand on that point.

And so the easiest way for me to talk about it is in terms of EBITDA level.

So let's say I go out and I buy a

$6 million EBITDA company for seven times.

So that's $42 million of enterprise value.

And let's say I put two turns of leverage on on it so two times six million is 12.

so 42 minus 12 is 30 million dollars of equity and let's say i make eight of those investments in the fund so now we're talking about 240 million so this is very typical of what we do now

if i have one

8x outcome on 30 million of equity I have now just returned the fund with one investment.

And it just so happens that the preponderance of those types of outcomes, of that quantum,

happen in smaller funds rather than larger funds.

And the way you get into the top quartile in private equity is not by printing these steady 3x returns on all eight of your investments.

You have one or two large outcomes that drive those returns.

And

so the question is,

you know, how are returns generated?

And it's very important for us

as investors to understand how returns are generated.

And so if you look at a value bridge and that value bridge, you know, the drivers are cash flow accretion,

debt repayment, and multiple R.

And so now if you really study each of these three variables that drive value, drive performance, you begin to understand the difference of the opportunity offered in the lower middle market versus upper markets.

And of course, job number one is to drive cash flow.

We're all doing that.

We're all trying to do that.

And that's a big determinant of performance.

Debt's a bit different in the upper versus the lower market.

In the upper market, debt is very available.

A lot of these investments resemble leverage buyouts.

So you start with a lot of debt, and then you pay the debt down.

And as you pay the debt down, that's value accretive.

So it's a value driver.

In the lower middle market, you can't get much debt.

And if you're doing a buy and build and you're acquiring small businesses and adding them to your platform, you're typically increasing your debt over the whole.

So it's actually value destructive in the lower market.

But the single largest determinant of value or the most distinguishing one when looking at the upper versus the lower market is the third characteristic, which is multiple arbitrage, valuation arbitrage.

And

I would argue based upon my own experience that there

is

materially more value

opportunity offered in the lower middle market than the upper market.

We've been at this 10 years.

Our own experience across our realizations, more than two dozen realizations out of 110

small businesses in the portfolio, we've been able to increase

the multiple from entry to exit by seven and a half turns.

And that surprised us.

And we certainly don't

forecast that we'll be able to generate that when we go from a couple of dozen realizations to 100 realizations.

But it does illustrate the quantum

of value accretion you can add

in the lower middle market by buying at a lower valuation, growing the company, and then serving it up to that next rung of capital that has a massive amount of dry powder, unfunded commitments, where it's far more competitive and they're willing to pay higher prices.

Unpack that seven and a half.

How much of that is due to increased cash flow or increased profits?

And how much of that is due to multiple arbitrage?

Yeah, so I want to be clear.

So when I talk about a seven and a half turn uplift from the entry valuation to the exit valuation, we're only talking about multiple R.

So not to be confused with like a multiple on invested capital, right, which we can talk about.

But

those three variables, you know, cash flow accretion, you know, you're hoping to add.

one or two turns of moik you know through that activity and you're hoping not to destroy too much of that with the use of debt, right?

You're, you know, as I mentioned, the debt is typically going up.

For us, we've averaged about 2.9 times EBITDA of leverage at entry, and that will tend to go up a bit, but it's rare that it would exceed four turns of EBITDA

at exit.

But

that third component is pure valuation, multiple R.

For us, when we look across all the sectors that we invest in, and we're single-sector investors for the most part,

we blend in at buying these companies at eight times,

and we have sold them at 15.5 times.

That's the seven and a half turn uplift that I

spoke about.

So, in that example, with 8x, you're doubling the multiple of which you're selling them at.

Almost.

And then you also have the increase, the one to 2x increase from the cash flow.

And then you're paying, some of that is being paid back in debt in the leverage that you put on the deal.

That's exactly right.

And so

to frame this in terms of Moik, because I think people are

interested.

I mean, ultimately, people are going to

select a strategy that hopefully delivers better outcomes.

If you look at the

private equity market historically, and I should qualify that I am talking about, for the most part, control equity and growth equity transactions.

I personally don't invest in venture.

We have another colleague that's far better at that than I am.

So when I refer to private equity, it's really

control equity and growth equity.

The broad market has historically delivered at two and a half

times gross Moike at the deal level.

So that's kind of the private equity market.

And

we've been doing this for 10 years.

And across the realizations I spoke of, we've been able to generate a return that is

two turns higher than the market.

So it's been a pretty compelling

segment of the market for us to focus on.

Basically, going from a two and a half average to four and a half for UCLA is great performance.

Why are there not more endowments like UCLA going into the lower middle market?

I think there are a lot of reasons.

At the end of the day, the stars have to align in terms of the AUM you're managing because that dictates what kind of team

you can support.

And you need a large enough team so that you can devote sufficient time to develop a specialization.

to a particular strategy,

this being one that we pursue.

And then, on the other hand, if you write $50 million checks,

and if you're worried about

being too large a percentage of the fund you're entering, then it becomes very difficult to invest in small funds.

And if you reduce your fund check size, then it really is not moving the needle for very large endowments.

Then

you're not putting money behind partners and

managers that have a very strong

brand recognition.

In many cases, you're meeting managers for the first time

as you get to know them.

And

therefore, you need the right governance framework.

And so

it's extremely helpful if the team

is making the decision on manager hires, as opposed to, say, a board that you're reporting to.

And

I have,

I'm very fortunate to have very strong support from my CIO who

appreciates the performance potential that this strategy represents.

and believes we can manage the loss.

And that also holds true for our board.

And I would also add that we have a strong capability in operational due diligence, which is important when

you are diligencing

managers that really don't have a brand name.

And

probably 12 of the 15 managers on our roster, we entered at Fund 1.

So there's very little in the way of track record.

So for all all these reasons, you know, size,

you know,

governance model,

and then, you know, capability in terms of specialization and ODD, all this kind of factors in

to what kind of firm can focus on this end of the market.

And I think that's why you see

less in the way of

institutions investing in this part of the market.

And back to my

earlier point,

if you don't formulate a strategy and you're just left with

selecting the

world-class managers, you're not likely to focus on this end of the market.

I believe that

you always have to invest in highly competent people and teams, but I don't like to use words like world-class or

rock stars or golden boys or girls or any of this nomenclature that

you hear frequently talked about when

people are talking up a manager.

So there's this paradox where you need somebody highly technical, very experienced in the space,

but also you can't be this mega endowment that has to invest billions and billions of dollars in every strategy.

So you need almost this like Goldilocks endowment with precision

asset allocation, also a board and a governance that supports this precision-like strategy.

That's fair.

At least that's how I approach it.

And you mentioned something that triggered another thought.

Just as important as

pursuing these specific segments, because you think they offer higher potential, it does another very important thing for the team.

And that is it allows you to completely ignore large swaths of the market.

And that's not only important

to help us find the better managers in the small market, but we also have to manage a few other asset classes.

And so we have also developed pretty nuanced strategies in those nuanced, I'm sorry, those asset classes, which help us ignore large swaths of those markets.

Because time is the most precious resource that an LP has,

just given that most of the time these are fairly small teams managing large pools of capital.

presumably you're becoming more skilled in whatever you spend time effort and turns on so you're building your competency within the lower middle market versus if you were to dilute it across all of private equity you would become a generalist across those

verticals

absolutely it

that's true in spades um i mean we take it further and we

We invest in

two strategies within private equity.

If we're buying performing companies, high quality companies through our partners, we're doing that through a single sector format.

And

the other strategy we pursue is special situations, and we sort of relax that single sector orientation because we want them to cast a really broad net because it's more of a bottoms up hunting exercise.

you know, it's the lower middle market, then it's single sector or specialist sit.

So it gets very specific.

And

that

level of specialization allows you to have a degree of pattern recognition

whereby, one, you're taking far fewer meetings.

And then the meetings you're taking are highly productive.

And you're using that pattern recognition to diligence.

different aspects of their activities and business.

And it just helps you, it's a much more efficient exercise than having a group come in that says, hey, by the way, you know, we invest in these,

you know, these four or five private equity sectors, you know, consumer, you know, tech,

industrial, financial services.

It's very sort of

discombobulating for me to take that kind of meeting today and spend 15 minutes on each of those sectors, it's it's I don't find it very productive.

I would even further strengthen that in that your value as an LP to the GP is also your focus, and that you're able to see

because you could only invest in so many funds and managers, so many managers, you have much more valuable insights across your GPs that you could share with your GPs versus if you were spread thin, it'd be more difficult to bring value as an LP.

It's very important.

Like, you know,

it's important that

an endowment team be the partner of choice with

the GPs that you're targeting.

And I think in their view, you know, the more knowledgeable the LP is about their business, the more likely that LP is going to be able to ride through

the rough patches that are invariably going to occur

because we're all equity investors.

We're just taking lots of risk.

And so it's never sort of a straight line to a, you know, a three or four or 5X outcome.

And

so that

intimacy with their business, I think, makes us a better partner.

You mentioned you do a lot of Fund One investments.

I've had TIFF and Innatai Foundation on the podcast talking about they even go earlier, they do independent sponsor deals.

Do you look at independent sponsor deals?

And what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, let me even back up further and help flesh out this market and where it sits sort of like downstream and upstream.

So we talked about what is downstream in terms of the middle market, the upper middle market, the large market.

And we can get into it, but effectively, there's so much dry powder in those segments that we're trying to play underneath that wave of of dry powder and we're taking yeah we're taking the execution risk of doubling or tripling the size of a small business and graduating it it up

over a certain ebita threshold where the buyer universe opens up the debt capacity opens up debt pushes value, competition of capital pushes value.

And that's where you get that multiple ARP.

You know, whether it's two times, three times, or seven and a half times, you can count on some level of multiple ARP.

Now, upstream from the market that I've been talking about is, I would not define it.

I think you have to separate

size versus the capitalization.

You know, so we talked about the independent sponsor market.

That's really a capitalization lens

to look through.

So you have to, a lot of times, those folks are buying

middle market, upper middle market,

or small market companies.

So you can't just say that independent sponsors are buying smaller companies.

They're not.

And then, of course, upstream from them is the search fund market.

And those break down into funded search or unfunded search.

And the funded search,

you know,

committee capital vehicles, you know, those folks are typically going after larger companies than the unfunded search.

And

we can run into those folks.

And I prefer the risk in the lower middle market to funded search because the team just is just far more resourceful.

and has a lot more value creation levers to pull because the portfolio tends to be more concentrated.

Whereas funded search, they could be doing

two dozen deals.

It's hard for them to really add a lot of value as, say, a GP.

The unfunded search, we can't touch it.

It's more just one-off.

It's just some person that has found a company

and then they're passing the hat looking for capital.

We're not set up to

invest in that opportunity set.

So back to your question

on the independent sponsors,

of course, there's always one-off

co-investments to be made there.

We have not done that.

And then of course now you see funds being raised that would invest in independent sponsor transactions.

either one-off, you know, sort of, you know, partner by partner or programmatically where they're funding maybe three or four deals for the partner, preparing them to launch a fund, you know, at a later time.

And,

you know,

we haven't had to consider that because our performance

has been sufficient.

I don't see any performance advantage right now

in pivoting

our focus to that end of the market.

So you've chosen not to be in the middle market and upper middle market private equity funds, but as an endowment, you do have to be diversified.

How do you think about it from a portfolio construction side, not having exposure to that part of the market?

Back in the old days when we first launched, we were much more opportunistic than methodical in deploying our private equity.

And

so there might have been years where we made one investment or two investments in private equity.

I personally don't think that's enough.

I think private equity is probably the best beta out of any asset class.

If I'm defining beta as just the market return.

And so, through cycle, you know, rolling five-year periods, rolling 10-year periods, private equity is the best performing asset class in our portfolio.

And I think it's probably the best in most.

And

so

I like to think that you want to, when you have a great beta like that, this is getting into portfolio construction, which you ask about, you want to make sure that you're harvesting that beta.

And so if you're making one or two investments, the return dispersion within private equity and venture is so wide that you know you might be lucky enough to uh you know have participated in a first quartile fund or you might have participated in a fourth quartile fund.

So in my view,

four is kind of like the ideal four per year.

And I think a good range to think about is three to six commitments per year.

And that's going to diversify you sufficiently so that you're harvesting that return.

But through manager selection, you stand a chance of outperforming the market.

So you're adding the alpha.

So three to six funds per year, which may have how many positions under my preference is for five to nine positions.

You know, in the old days, you'd see a lot of these groups.

Again, they were a lot of them were multi-sector.

And so they had, you know, teams working in consumer and fin services and software and you know,

industrials.

And they were all expected to populate the portfolio.

So you'd see 12 to 15 positions.

I think the other thing that's changed is the

commitment period.

You know, in the legal docs, it's still five years.

In the old days, people were using five years.

Today they're not.

I think it's short-sighted not to

think in terms of like the value of the optionality that you're given with the five-year commitment window, but you rarely see that today.

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So it's like

what's the typical deployment in the lower middle market investment?

I don't think it's too different across a a lot of other asset classes.

I think it's probably gravitated to closer to three years.

And that, you know, that

creates its own vagaries.

Because if you're a serial investor and you're trying to invest, you know, we like to say arbitrarily, we'd love to get three funds out of a relationship.

You know, I've been here 22 years and we still have a group that's in the portfolio that we put in the year in which I joined.

So there's, you know, three serial funds, it's arbitrary.

But

you can imagine that if you're on a three-year cycle,

by the time you get to fund two,

more likely than not, there's been no realizations in fund one.

And by the time you get to fund three, you know, maybe you've seen a few.

And so it...

it puts a lot of pressure on the LP.

And so you have to start looking looking at the fundamentals at the portfolio company level, and you have to start to

evaluate what the company has

done in actuality along the lines of revenue, EBITDA, margins, versus what they underwrote for a company that might be three, four, five years into its hold period if it hasn't been sold.

So you have to start looking at the fundamental performance.

And the investment period may be similar across lower middle market, middle market, and upper middle market.

What about where the value is from the GP side?

So we talked about you do less leverage and you have more multiple arbitrage, but

are the top GPs, the top quartile GPs, are they top quartile pickers?

negotiation, you know, all that?

Or are they top quartile value add and operational people?

You know, like I think most investors, we were very focused on,

you know, operational value add.

And I mean, really, the

quantitative metric is growth of cash flow.

And I'd throw in, you know, margin there.

So revenue growth and margin.

And so that is the that's the ballast of the return.

And I think everybody is focused on that.

But

back to the value bridge, I think what a lot of people downplay, and you'll hear

general partners make comments like,

well,

we don't underwrite multiple expansion.

And I think that's fine.

That expresses a view of conservatism,

which I think is healthy.

But I think on the other side of that coin,

it's also an

illustration

that they believe that multiple ARB is fleeting,

meaning that it comes and goes over the course of

a market cycle.

And I'd like to make a comment about that.

So when you look at

the price at which the middle market and the upper market are buying companies, you know,

it's a high, not only is it a higher

sort of relative

sort of multiple than the lower.

So if the lower middle market is down here, the upper middle market's up here.

But the other fascinating thing that you find about that

market characteristic is

through time, the amplitude of the purchase multiple in the upper markets, that amplitude swings more

than the lower middle market.

The lower middle market is pretty steady.

You don't take a lot of market risk buying small companies.

You know, the multiple might flux, you know, one turn

over or under its historical trend line, but you can see really massive fluctuation in the middle and the upper market.

And the reason you see that

is that there's a lot more capital washing around that market as represented by unfunded commitments.

And there's a lot more debt capacity.

You can put on a lot more leverage.

And as the interest rates fluctuate,

you know, we came out of a really low interest rate environment up until a few years ago.

That really pushed those multiples quite a bit higher.

And

then when those rates go up, you see the multiples

come down because

those partners, they know they can't get as much debt and the debt isn't as accretive.

So they got to make their return

more

from a higher amount of equity.

And so they recognize they have to pay less for that in order to get their return.

So that's another really interesting dynamic about the lower versus the middle and upper market.

Upstream, you have the interest rate.

The interest rate goes down.

Private equity managers are able to either raise, probably raise bigger funds and also pay more because now less of that.

is equity and more of it is debt.

So now that drives up pricing.

Is that a lagging indicator?

In other words, if interest rates go down in 2026, will it take a couple of years for that to flush out in the market?

Or is it more like an efficient market where it basically the prices go up almost immediately?

The way that we get impacted in the smaller end of the market, it's not on the buy, it's on the sell.

So if our manager's done their job and they've tripled the size of a company and they've graduated up into this

higher higher rung of,

you know, higher valuation segment where all these middle market firms are,

you know, they're trying to find the best new platform, right?

Or they might even be trying to find an add-on to a larger platform and our platform becomes their add-on, right?

The way we get impacted is they might come back, you know, if rates go up as they did, this did happen to us,

you know, rates shot up and that buyer came back to our partner and said, hey,

you know,

I can't get the debt I used to get.

I can't pay as much.

You know, I'd have to retrade you.

And

I want to

offer a smaller amount.

And,

you know, our partner just pulled the deal.

and decided just to kind of wait it out to see if things would improve.

And

I think it happens pretty fast.

So if I don't know, I'm not going to be a

prognosticator of where rates go, but if they

if they do go down, then I think you'll find people just putting on more leverage.

Because the leverage essentially is on a deal-by-deal basis, not on the fund basis.

That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Double-clicking on that GP

on the ideal GP, the ideal GP avatar.

If you had to choose between somebody that was really good at picking and negotiating versus somebody that was very good at operations which one would you pick and why the way we've evolved david is um you know i mentioned when buying performing high quality companies we come at it through a single sector um orientation

So we're

big believers in this.

In other words, they may do nothing but consumer or FinServices or GovServices or industrial

or business services or healthcare services.

So

we have exposure to all those managers, and we're probably one to three deep in each of the sectors.

So the question is, why do we do that?

We want the manager

to have

the best odds at buying the highest quality companies at the lowest possible price.

So we want their value proposition to the prospective portfolio company to be overwhelming.

We want the portfolio company to meet with the manager and reflect on

that meeting

and

come to the conclusion that they don't even want to go on it.

A lot of times these sellers are wanting to roll equity and stay involved, but take some chips off the table.

But they do want to roll equity and they want to stay involved.

And so they want to find the right partner to go on this journey with.

And so,

you know, if we're talking about the industrial sector,

generally speaking, we want our managing partners to come from not only investment backgrounds, but it's very common that there is a former PE-back

CEO involved.

And, you know, why is that important?

Well, it gets to exactly what you're talking about.

I'll come to value creation, but just staying on the purchase opportunity for a moment,

the way you get to really strong returns is you buy a company at a lower price than is prevailing in the market right now.

So if that sector is trading here, you're buying at a turn lower or whatever.

Then once you purchase it,

you embark on your value creation initiative and you grow cash flow.

And then you graduate it up into this higher rung of capital that's willing to pay a higher multiple.

So

all those things come into play in producing your return.

And I would just add one more thing.

You're professionalizing the company and you're improving the quality of the earnings.

And although that may not show up quantitatively in growing cash flow,

it will in the margin and it will absolutely result in a higher multiple.

So all those things are important, but back to

single sector,

wanting operating executives executives and investors on the team.

And just

sticking on that topic for a moment, you can just imagine

if you're going to a meeting with a potential seller who wants to rule some equity in a sector like industrial, and your partner is a former PE-backed CEO that had three successful outcomes in industrial.

You know, he or she can sit across from

that owner

and

sort of reminisce about their shared experience.

And ultimately what you hope happens is

you have several factors that the seller is considering when selling that company.

Price being one.

but you know uh you know potential partnership is another terms might be another you know i i think about this as key buying criteria.

It's a marketing term where

if you're pitching your product to

a customer, that customer has

four or five criteria that they're considering when deciding to buy your product or service over another.

So

hopefully

through that kind of dynamic,

you're able to persuade

that seller to deprioritize price

amongst their criteria of selling the company to the right partner.

And so that's how,

you know, that's why it's important on the buy.

And that's the value that a single sector fund that has operating capabilities sitting inside the partnership brings to the table.

I gave you a false binary.

I said, Do you want the lowest price or do you want the most value add?

And your response was, the most value add will lead to the lowest price and also lead to multiple.

So you want the lowest price and you want the highest value add.

There's a circular aspect to it in that the lowest price will also get you the highest, the highest return on highest absolute return on it as well.

So you might buy a $20 million company for $15 million because you have the value add.

And because of the value add, you could now increase the value by three times versus by two times.

So you get this multiplicative.

A very excellent formula to think about is

to buy a company a half a turn or a turn

under the comp set that's prevailing in the market,

double the cash flow

and sell it for three turns higher.

right and use modest leverage that's going to lead to a very attractive outcome that every private equity investor is going to be happy with.

And so that is, I think it's extremely important for people to understand the value drivers

and how you generate a return and how much each of those value drivers can flex and therefore how much they're contributing to the return.

And then you can start, you know, putting together your diligence

sort of process

based upon trying to answer those questions.

So let me try to break this model.

So let's say you have three operating partners, best-in-class operators, and you have either no investment people or maybe some junior partner that has been at one of the top PE firms for 10 years.

Could that work?

Only operating GPE fund work?

Or does it also break if you don't have enough investment acumen?

I think it's helpful to have both.

You know, I think both backgrounds bring an immense amount of value to the table.

And I'm trying to think.

So we have a partnership where there's

three operators and one investor, and the investor is the junior partner.

We have another one with

two operators and one investor.

And then you see an awful lot where there's one investor and one operator.

The investment acumen is important

for a couple of reasons.

I would just say, generally speaking, fund management, portfolio construction,

governance.

I think another really important value they bring is capital allocation.

Because the operators, they can dream up all kinds of value creation initiatives to embark upon once you own the company.

But the best teams know that their time is limited and they need to prioritize those value creation initiatives.

And there's no better way to do that than

in terms of thinking about return on time and return on capital.

So that gets to capital allocation.

And generally speaking,

the

folks with the investment background are are better at that have more experience at that

thank you for listening to join our community and to make sure you do not miss any future episodes please click the follow button above to subscribe do you find that in the lower middle market since a lot of those companies are owned by the original founder the family operator they tend to have more rapport with the operators versus maybe if a private equity fund bought the company they have more rapport with investor types Is there something to that?

Absolutely.

Like, there's no question.

I had a really interesting

diligence call a couple of weeks ago with

a seller, and he was rolling equity.

So, this was the founder of a small business in the industrial space.

And you could tell this gentleman was extremely reticent to sell

or to take on an equity investment.

It was a controlled transaction, but he was rolling a very substantial amount of equity.

And you could tell that he had so much pride in his business.

It was so important to him.

And

he had kind of a chip on his shoulder.

And

he was a little wary of how much value the private equity firm could offer him.

And he said repeatedly throughout the call, you know,

whether or not he thought they would add any value.

But of course, you know that he hoped they would add a lot of value.

But I think it gets back to the idea that he had a lot of pride.

It dawned on me during that call that that company would never sell to the vast majority of private equity firms.

Even though, you know, that company was for sale and it was represented by a broker and anybody, you know,

could have thrown in a bid.

Anybody could have potentially meeted with the management team.

It dawned on me that

the vast majority of them would have no chance at any price to sell to that gentleman.

So, double-click on that because I want to put numbers on that.

So, let's take it to the extreme.

Let's say it's 100% sale of the company.

When founders found the company, have you ever seen a founder take less money because they thought the company would be in better hands?

Oh, yeah.

I mean,

that's almost the formula.

That's an emotional belief in what you've built and wanting it to be in good hands.

So, not a quote-unquote rational decision.

So, you're bringing up a very important

point to managing risk.

You are very hopeful that your manager isn't buying 100% of the equity.

You know, you're, these are small, we haven't talked about the risks of small businesses, but

there are risks.

And

of course, the founder of a small business is

potentially very important,

particularly through a transition.

And so one way to manage your risk is not to buy all the equity,

but to make the transaction very meaningful

for the founder so they can take some chips off the table table and they have a nice pool of capital that they can diversify their lifestyle with, but they're rolling equity.

And if the manager has done their job

correctly, they have shown

to the founder what the potential is for them.

on that amount of equity rolled.

And many times the potential at the ultimate sale five years later can result in

a higher amount of capital flowing into the pocket of the founder than the initial transaction

amount that they take off the table.

And so, if that's the dynamic, then you can understand, you can appreciate the importance of selecting the right partner to go on that journey with, right?

That individual has to really trust the people involved and they have to buy into the

business plan, the value creation plan.

And if they don't, they're never going to sell to that partner.

What advice would you give to younger professionals that are looking to get into private equity and maybe this part of the private equity market, the lower middle market?

What's the best approach approach to land in that part of the industry?

My answer is the same across all asset classes.

I think it's really important to, you know, just

bring a lot of independent thinking.

You know, the term gets overused, but first principles, take a fresh look

at

the asset class.

And

I think there's immense value for investors and young people in particular

to really get familiar with the variables that are driving the returns

in the asset class.

So what are the components that are driving the returns?

There's no better way to do that than to build a model, an Excel model from scratch.

So build a, I call it a J-curve model.

It's really a fun model that

you'd build it quarterly, you'd deploy it over five years, you'd define some hold period,

you would add a variable that grows cash flow from entry over the course of the quarters and the hold period.

You would make some assumption about where you're going to sell that at on some EBITDA multiple versus entry.

You'd add leverage to the model.

You'd add a waterfall.

And once you have all this, you can start to play with these variables and you can understand the relative importance to each, of each on the total return.

And then once you're comfortable with that,

you can look at the dynamics of

the asset class.

And in private equity, you know, I think, I personally think one of the most interesting things is just where all the dry powder sits.

And so if you look at this mountain of dry powder and you start stratifying it by fund size, you'll find that it all sits above funds that are $500 million

and larger.

So that was the original basis for our strategy in the lower middle market is, hey, once you strip out all that dry powder above 500 million, you're basically left with this, like if you were to take like a fat tip black felty and just draw it on the zero line, that's the dry powder in the lower middle market.

And then, of course, there's far more targets in the lower middle market than the large market in terms of the number of portfolio companies to buy.

So that was the basis of our original thesis is, hey, like if we buy these small companies that are trading at lower multiples and they're trading at lower multiple because there's less capital splashing around.

And we can take the execution risk of double or tripling the size and then selling them into this next tier of capital where all this capital is washing around and where this debt capacity is higher, then that's a good formula.

You mentioned first principles.

I agree.

That's something that's overused.

One other way to say the same thing is top-down thinking versus bottom-up thinking.

Usually top-down thinking, you look at what everyone's doing and you start asking why.

And 90-95% of the time,

it makes sense.

It's an efficient market.

They're doing them.

They're doing things the way that they should be done.

But sometimes 5% to 10% of the time, and it could be asymmetric, that could be a really big opportunity.

They should, they're just following what everyone else has always done, and that's the wrong strategy.

And that's where you could really generate alpha, which is just risk-free return or

additional return that is not commensurate with the risk, the definition of alpha.

So I think as an investor, you could use, you could just keep on asking the question, why and why?

You could get some interesting answers.

And a lot, there's, there's a lot of sacred cows in our industry that nobody dares question why they're done because, you know, most of the time you have a question, you have an answer, and you look like an idiot, but sometimes you uncover something special.

This is absolutely true, and you're

spot on.

And it makes me think of, I think, something else that's important for me to say, particularly to younger professionals.

You know, my team didn't wake up and just have this epiphanal moment and, you know, and just sort of like

envision this grand

strategy that we just hypothesized overnight.

It just doesn't work that way, right?

Like, all you know, that this whole conversation is kind of capstone.

It's a capstone of 10 years of effort, right?

And so hopefully you have some market insight into

one of the like the very important basic elements of market structure that is occurring in an asset class.

You know, for us, that epiphanal moment in private equity was where the dry powder sits.

In natural resources, it was, hey, you know, you're facing a real steep cost curve, so you better be very low.

And then you just start pulling these threads.

And, you know, you're surrounded by really smart people that are contributing to these conversations.

And you're just iterating.

And you're pulling on these threads and you're developing,

your strategy evolves.

And you just put one step in front of the other.

And in some cases, it's two steps forward and one step back.

right?

Where

you make a mistake, right?

And then you course correct and then you take another step forward.

And then you ultimately end up with a really robust strategy that,

and I should say, I'll say another thing.

I'm not very tactical.

I used to think that it would be smart to get really cute and

make one or two tactical investments per year.

Maybe I'll do that, but I'm not trying to do that.

And that's very hard to do.

And

so my point is that you want to think more strategically.

And so you're hoping that whatever

element of the market structure that you're focused on is going to have some legs, right?

It's not going to be this fleeting six-month or one-year sort of trade, right?

I honestly believe

that we could be executing.

I mean, we've been executing this lower middle market strategy for 10 years.

And if we don't get too big,

you know, it's kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't.

You know, we want the endowment to be as large as possible so we can have the biggest impact to UCLA.

But on the other hand, you know, at some point we're going to grow out of our

ability

to invest in the most attractive segment of

the market.

But I believe that we have some runway still.

Back to young people and young professionals,

I would also say,

really think about your personality and your strengths and weaknesses.

And

I happen to be a big believer in Myers-Briggs.

And

in my younger years, I was never really that focused on, okay, what are my strengths and weaknesses?

Today I'm very attuned to what my strengths and weaknesses are.

And I function better in private markets than I spent my first 10 years as a generalist.

So across the entire portfolio, public markets, hedge funds, et cetera.

I am, as a personality type, much more

better equipped to work in private markets.

And

I would encourage people, you know, to put one foot in front of the other, get familiar with what drives returns,

and then develop,

you know,

an approach.

And what comes with that development is confidence.

And

then with confidence, you're willing to kind of stretch the boundaries.

of your strategy and your approach, and you're able to take on a little bit more.

And then you're going to find yourself, I think,

in a spot where you can bring all that to bear

on behalf of your organization and really drive performance.

Well, Michael, this has been an absolute masterclass in the lower middle market.

Thanks for taking the time and look forward to continuing this conversation in person.

Thanks, David.

It's been my pleasure being with you.

Thanks for listening to my conversation.

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