Brad Jacobs

You can't be reckless.

You need to be disciplined.

You need to be professional.

But you want to move fast.

Jack Welch was a big proponent of speed.

He was always emphasizing throughout the whole organization, you got to move fast.

Things get worse, not better.

Particularly with deals, by the way.

When I do M&A, I do them very, very fast.

I can get a deal done in two weeks.

Whereas I've gazumped, I've interfered, I've preempted many sell-side processes where a bank has a book and a data room and a whole schedule of here's the first round, here's the management meetings, here's the second round.

Everyone gets their consultants and they better spend all this time and money doing all this due diligence.

I know what I'm looking for.

I don't need a lot of that due diligence.

I need to meet with the people.

I need the basic fundamental paperwork, obviously.

But I don't need to know why SG&A is an eighth of a percent higher than it was in the forecast and hire a consultant to write a report on that nonsense.

And then you just take the report and no one ever does anything with it afterwards.

I need to meet with the people.

If I can meet with the top dozen or so people in a company and I can spend an hour, hour and a half with each one of those people, I know everything I need to know about that company.