Jeff Schwartz

But there was really no one providing what we would call structured capital to small businesses where we could provide capital for an owner of a business to make an acquisition, to buy out a minority shareholder, to take a dividend and still benefit from private equity style sponsorship and support.

And I thought that void in the market created a real opportunity for me to raise a fund around that strategy and generate off-market risk-adjusted returns for my investors.

That's an interesting question.

I'd always wanted to do something more entrepreneurial, as I mentioned.

But after 15 plus years of primarily being an investor, the only type of business that I felt like I could run would be an investment firm.

So I thought that if I just rolled out an investment strategy and got a bunch of investors, I could spend my time primarily doing deals just the way I had done deals my entire career and probably underestimated, to your point, just how much work there was behind running a business.

And our firm is now a business.

We manage over a billion dollars of capital and have 20 plus employees and offices and infrastructure.

And that all requires management.

And I probably spend as much time managing the firm as I do working on individual deals.

I'm not sure I appreciated how time consuming that would be, but it's been really rewarding.

But there definitely is more work involved in running the firm than I think that regular way private equity professionals or regular investment bankers give credit to management for.

Well, I think it's a little bit more of a player to a player coach than a full-on manager.

Now it's probably more of a manager, but for the first several years when our team was smaller and we had fewer deals that we were working on and less capital,

I was really doing both.

Finance businesses are notoriously challenging to grow and manage.

So we've made some, I think, really smart strategic decisions about how to grow the firm without sacrificing performance and sacrificing the experience that our employees were getting as investors.

So fundraising is a challenge for, except for the very, very large established private equity firms, for anyone in the middle market or the lower middle market, capital raising is a challenge.

We, as you mentioned, we were somewhat victims of our own success early on and were able to leverage some of the relationships with high net worth individuals and small foundations and family offices that we'd had.

throughout our career, and they served as the investor base for our funds early on.