Marcus Magarian Data Driven Investing

Ep 011 Marcus Magarian “Data Driven Investing”

Marcus Magarian is Managing Director at Chatsworth Securities, LLC. Marcus brings more than expertise in technology and data analysis experience to the investment banking industry. Marcus works with multinational corporations in origination and placing capital for private equity, feeder funds, and private placements, between the US, EU & Latin America for Real Estate, Energy, Oil and Gas, Infrastructure, and Corporate interests.

Listen To This Interview as Cliff and Marcus discuss:

  • How data analysis of customer behavior in e-commerce drives investment advice.
  • Examples of what data points to consider in pricing derivatives.
  • Trends in the e-commerce space that affect your investment strategy.
  • How COVID-19 has impacted the investor/advisor relationship dynamic with new clients.
  • How data analysis works in determining risk or predicting ROI.

and more.

email: mmagarian@chatsworthgroup.com

phone: (203) 340-2827 Ext 122

Transcript:

Cliff Locks 0:02
Welcome to the private equities profits podcast. I’m Cliff lox your hosts who With me today is Marcus Magarian, Managing Director of Chatsworth securities, LLC. Marcus brings more than expertise in technology and data analysis experience to the investment banking industry. Marcus works with multinational corporations in origination and placing capital for private equity, feeder funds, and private placements between the US EU and Latin America. For real estate, energy, oil and gas, infrastructure, and corporate interests. Mark is welcome. Please share with the audience a little of your backstory.

Marcus Magarian 0:40
Hi, Cliff. Good afternoon. Thanks for having me here. The pleasure. I’ve been watching a lot of your previous interviews, so very excited to be here. I’m a native New Yorker been here all my life, you know, started out working at my dad’s store at the time square area, got my first job at derivatives at Morgan Stanley Merrill Lynch. After that, then Business School, we opened a Brazilian bank in New York and London doing natural resources, private placements, when that whole thing died off, I was lucky enough to get a job at a tech company doing UX analytics for about three to four years. And coming back into banking, we’ve been focusing quite heavily in things in the payment space, analytic space, everything involving data, which is we’d like to call the new oil.

Cliff Locks 1:23
Very true. How does the data analysis of customers behavior and e commerce drive investment advice?

Marcus Magarian 1:29
The most important thing about data is that it’s free. And it’s so telling, I always like to tell my customers or prospects like you know, it’s kind of like, if you have people in a focus group, it’s like you like Coke? Or do you like Pepsi? And then give us your advice. The first person that speaks, they’ll say, I like Pepsi, or they like Coke, it’ll influence everybody in the room. And what happens with data is that like, it’s completely naked, you know exactly what the people are really thinking, without, you know, ever having to ask them, you know, this I gave an example of this was when we were working with Electrolux, we, I told them, like, Hey, 99.98% of your customers don’t want to buy an air conditioning system. And they have no idea why it’s because the most important thing is that the data told me that this was the case. So we are able to change things increase their sales is about 100 times. I mean, it was easy when you do and you have hardly any sales. But every but using that skill, those skills today, you could basically go to any company and say, okay, you have a million people going to your site, let’s say your average order value is $100, you have about a 2% conversion ratio. So I’ll do $100 times 20,000, you make $2 million. From there, we want to know exactly what their goal is, you know, they’re looking to buy a company, sell a company expand by market share, etc, etc. So, very good. It’s very telling. And it’s a way to advise clients without having to ask them questions.

Cliff Locks 2:56
Can you give us examples of what the data points you consider in pricing derivatives

Marcus Magarian 3:00
with derivatives, I mean, that’s I the one thing I love about derivatives is that it’s very similar to analytics. So back in 2000, when we saw and I started working at Morgan Stanley derivatives, were priced kind of like just taking market data, just same way you would take on through a Google Analytics or some kind of analytics capturing tool. And you know, you want to volatility, you want to know exactly what the buzz is on the stocks or some kind of technical analysis. And today, you have, you know, I use those skills from 30 days in order to price companies. Because everything with digital companies is dependent on data flows. And so like, it’s kind of the example I gave before you have a person that comes into a site, I know how the traffic is behaving, but the most important thing I have to know is where’s that traffic coming from. So if I’m selling fishing equipment, and I’m bringing my traffic from the Wall Street Journal, my sales won’t be as good as if I drove it from another site. That was where the person came into the site, thinking about fishing equipment. And it’s the same thing with so everything with data, it’s how do you manipulate the data, which is really the individuals that are going into your website or to your app, the same way that people engage in the stock market.

Cliff Locks 4:19
I’m excited you’re going into a forensic analysis on those companies that you’re looking to help raise funding at this point. But really understanding what drives revenue. And the sources of that traffic. It’s critical at this point for sustainable sale. What trends are you seeing in e commerce space that affect your investment strategy?

Marcus Magarian 4:40
Right now with COVID? Right now, actually, I have a group out of the UK that I’m a board member of here in New York. It’s called it’s a retail group. And what we’re trying to do now is take possession of stores on Bleecker Street and make it into a COVID store. So it’s it’s important because everything we’re doing in e commerce Everything is becoming more omni channel. So what does a store look like in the future with COVID V is put out a report saying that you had 60% of people were paying by phone or the stores have the ability to pay by phone. Now it’s like 85%. And everything is digitally transforming to this contactless payment world and all these things that didn’t exist before. So what you’ve really had is a really massive acceleration in that market, the digital world online shopping has really converted over into the brick and mortar side. Amazon was way ahead of this when they had the thing where you could go into a store, which, you know, there’s more to it, but you go into a store, you can only go in if you have a phone. It’s a problem. If you don’t have a phone, surprised, no one’s saying about discrimination. But if I go into the store, I could walk out without even talking to a cash register person or paying or pulling out a credit card or anything like that. And the concept that we’re trying to do is saying, okay, 70% or 60% of stores on Bleecker Street, are empty. There’s all these things happening with moratoriums, landlords aren’t getting their rent monies. And Nope, because I was walking in safer give stuff stay home because of social distancing. And all those things. Let’s take stores and do virtual fitting rooms and fulfillment centers. No, no inventories are items that stores and make it like an e commerce store, but with a physical presence. But when you have all that information, you’re collecting the data on your customers store. The way this used to be done when we were much younger, used to see guys in the corner of the streets tapping on these little metal things. And what those guys are doing was counting the foot traffic going left to right. Nowadays on you that everything is digitally tracked, you have you carry a mobile device, the beacon captures everything. So in business school, they were went to business school in France. So we obviously the Louis Vuitton case study, when somebody walks into the Louis Louis Vuitton store one on shawnzy, the likelihood is that a Westerner will turn left. So they put their most expensive and most popular items there like women’s handbags, the ones that you see whatever men’s stuff was to the right. And all the way in the back right was smaller handbags, which were more popular for Asian communities. And so they took an old way of doing a method, which today everyone can do, because it’s very expensive to have someone sit there and click all day. And you also have to understand that the data probably won’t be accurate, if someone’s clicking themselves manually, versus a computer collecting all these things.

Cliff Locks 7:32
So how has COVID-19 impacted your investor advisor relationship dynamics with clients,

Marcus Magarian 7:40
we’ve gone from less private placements to more m&a. And I prefer m&a versus it’s harder to do. Because everything. It’s it’s like a marriage. Because the thing is that a private placement, you’ll probably most people will accept 10% 20% of the company. There are those that one like you know more than 50%. But like because of the acceleration that we saw from like those things like the visa reports or contactless payments, or how people are using more digital means. There’s so many players that are completely out of the market. Now they have no choice but to consolidate. And so right now it’s a rush, because it’s like, like, we’re focusing very heavily in the payment space. A lot of our European clients, what’s happening is that they know that they’re having some kind of adverse event happening. But then you have companies like you know, I mean, toast is a bad example. But a company called lightspeed, they’ve raised so much money, they go in, and they just buy out markets. And they’ll overpay, they’ll pay massive multiples. And we’re seeing a lot of those things because and the problem with that is that if these companies don’t sell, because raising capital, forget about it, like because it’s just they’re not gonna be able to be fast enough. This other company, though, they’ll they’ll they buy one player, they’ll have, you know, 10,000 stores or 5000 stores was installed in there with a technology, and then we’ll just start cannibalizing market share, kind of like that scargo thing that, you know, that Walmart did when they first opened and started expanding through the United States. Right now we’re seeing massive land grabs happen. And it’s the Luddite players that either have to move, or they’re going to be out of business. And there are many people that we speak to, who are who know that because of COVID, you had this massive jump in technology, that they know that they have to move somehow it’s either going to sell the company or they get integrated into another company. And we do like a stock swap kind of thing. And that’s really been the play.

Cliff Locks 9:38
I really do get it you have to disrupt yourself at this point.

Marcus Magarian 9:42
Like when I I was an engineering student in college and like I didn’t touch coding for a long time. But I will not go into a deal with I go into a deal I never asked for a pitch deck. I think it’s a waste of time because it is marketing puff and having worked at it. The problem with working at a tech company when you come from an investment bank They have FINRA, so everything has to be transparent, clear. And all these things, how does data analysis work in determining the risk or predicting ROI? It really with data, or with a website, it’s all about your goal. And it has to be very clear. Like, if you take a company like WeChat, they do everything in the United States, WeChat wouldn’t really work. And so the closest thing you have is like Facebook, or like an Amazon, which is not really, it’s still pretty specific. When you work with data analysis, the first thing you want to know is what the purpose of the data is for. So like, if you’re capturing data from a pharmaceutical company versus a cosmetic company, the purpose of the data changes significantly. And this goes back to a point that I was trying to bring up before is that an investment banker today really has to understand database language. So I don’t ask for presentations when I asked for schemas. And I want to know what data you’re capturing and how you’re capturing. Because many times when you’ll speak with a company that’s like in the healthcare space, they said they want to do something with analytics. Great. Are you allowed to get that data? The answer is no. So then you can not do anything with that data, nor will you capture any of that information.

Cliff Locks 11:11
It’s interesting, because we’ve had some conversations with an organization called burst IQ. So it’s the blockchain, HIPAA compliant. And then I’m working with a team and I’m on their board. And we’re using an activity band, you something you and I would like it. And I will watch from Apple at this point in that data is being uploaded to the blockchain permission granted by the user at this point, and then we’re putting analytics against that. And then there’s a chat bot that goes back to the individual to try to motivate them to be more active. And they will actually reward that individual with tokenization, meaning similar to a cryptocurrency, yeah, to be more active than they can convert the crypto to buy organic food products in our Shopify store. So it’s an ecosystem, but it’s really about the wellness of the individual that is our customer at this point, utilizing the app.

Marcus Magarian 12:04
So yeah, like, one thing that you mentioned I love was the tokenization technology, because it prevents credit card fraud. It’s a way where you basically say I want to do a payment. But instead of sending the credit card information, you send a token. It’s like those little grasshoppers used to get back in the day, it’s like you want to log into your email from random country, you had to use the token, despite having to know your username and password.

Cliff Locks 12:29
The technology is accelerating. And the cost to actually build something is decreased substantially, which is somewhat of an equalizer, but you need brilliant people like yourself, Marcus, to step in and analyze, do we really have a market at this point is addressable? Is it going to be vibrant? Do they have the ability to pay? You know, what’s the vision of the future look like? What’s the vision of success, and then work it backwards at this point, it’s got to be profitable, it’s got to iterate. It’s got to be fun, you got to have a really strong team around, you know, when you’re building it out, it’s not just engineers, you need to know business, you and I had a conversation there, you know that the CEOs really need the vision Plus, they got to be able to run a business and allow the company to flourish. And the engineers are really more on the product side and the seamless in the user interfaces. It’s an exciting period of time. That’s the way I look at it. At this point is we digitalize in pretty much everything we’re touching at this point. Yeah.

Marcus Magarian 13:22
But I think because of where we are in the market today, this is why like, now you’re just seeing massive consolidation, or you’re seeing companies that received way too much cash, trying to go public. I haven’t seen as many IPOs since my days, like, you know, Merrill Lynch, where they’re having like an i one to five IPOs a day almost every week, that was like dude, just throwing them out. And what was interesting is that like, the reason why I find it interesting is because there’s the index called the Wilshire 5000. Sure. And it used to have in 1997 7500 stocks on the market. Us USA Today, a couple years ago came up with an article saying like today that 7500 stocks is now 3500 stock, less than half, or at least it’s around half a little more than half. It’s telling because what does it say? The IPO or the publicly traded company isn’t as well, it doesn’t have the same value as did before. So what does that mean? Take, you know, we have the credit crisis in 2008, you had the mortgage backed security. And those things were put into one piece of paper securitize. And yet, let’s say a million mortgages be broken up into millions of pieces and send it to a bunch of pension funds in Scandinavia, Europe or Asia. Today, if you want to manage those mbss there’s a tech company which will cover every single thing for you using analytical data. So you’ll buy the mortgages individually and you say I want specifically these kinds of mortgages, so you no longer have to buy these pre packaged mortgage backed security things. And the way it works is You go to like a bankrate.com, I need a mortgage, you put the mortgage, they sell the lead to a loan provider. The loan provider is like crossover bank. And their job is to structure the mortgage provide the capital in three months, they’ll resell that to a hedge fund. But the hedge fund obviously needs to track it using this technology, which friend of mine actually was one of the founders for its company called pure IQ. And they and so the the, you know, then you could track every single thing individually, but because the computers doing it, and they have a very homogenous way of looking at it, the computer just has to track everything over and over and over again. Did you pay that you’re not paying foreclosures? And what are the risk profiles? When you customize,

Cliff Locks 15:48
strong analytical tool in the right hands?

Marcus Magarian 15:51
Yeah, and you basically it’s like, you invented dishwashers, or washing dishes. And that gives you the opportunity cost to do something else. It’s like hiring a secretary or, you know, getting a car to get you to point a to point b faster, or using a plane to go to another country.

Cliff Locks 16:08
Describe the culture and the philosophy of your firm.

Marcus Magarian 16:12
Well, we are a firm that’s been around for over 30 years. It’s got a lot of great people we had, it started out really as a big IPO shop. And over the course of time, it’s obviously been transforming to now we’re doing tech deals started to become very successful. And the great thing is that you have a lot of people that are very willing to grow. And it’s interesting because a lot of the players come from very top end Ivy League schools, they were founders of divisions at Goldman Sachs worked at UBS worked at family offices, like the Qatari family fund, and a lot of a lot of very intelligent people. About the opportunity today is taking that knowledge and transforming it to something more digital for the younger generation at Chatsworth, what we’re trying to do, make it more, make it younger. And so like, the great thing is that they’re very open to it, we’ve been successful at it. I know it’s very exciting. I can tell you, it’s better than having a nine to five job at a bulge bracket bank, because you but you have to have a group of people that are open to going next steps,

Cliff Locks 17:19
describe your approach to helping companies structure their corporate direction, great strategy, preparing them for long term and capital stack.

Marcus Magarian 17:28
A lot of the times today on top of all those things that we do is a lot of times CEOs are looking at things at a very granular level, they only see their company’s day to day problems like problems that we will never know. And a lot of times it takes months or weeks to fully understand what a company is going to because people like CEOs exaggerate. They’re afraid there’s a performance factor and the CEO, you know, as we said before, he’s the number one sales guy or company. So he’s he’s selling even if he’s not supposed to sell to me, because my job is to be the buffer for him with investors or buyers. Nowadays, it says we mentioned before, it’s all about acquisitions, for you to be a company, you know, looking to do a startup and do some new idea, etc. It’s a little more challenging today during the Age of COVID. Unless you’re doing some it’s very COVID link, but we’ll have continuity after that. A lot of times we’ve had opportunities where we’re working with the CEO, one CEO for 10 years was paying over 20% cost of debt. Like how do you survive, you’re selling, you’re selling airplanes. And when I looked at the balance sheet, I started noticing they’re putting things like on their current light current ratio, or the current liabilities, making the current ratio going on, like 1.7 or something. And what happened was, I was like, well, no one’s gonna give you a loan. Because you look like you have terrible books. When we restructure the entire balance sheet. We got no current ratio of like four and a half, which is ridiculous, because you’re basically, you know, you’re destroying the value your company, got them alone right away. After 10 years, we cut the cost of the debt from 20 something percent like 22%, down to like 910 depending on what the line of credit was. And it was all because of format. And it was the reason was we had to get rid of the the bookkeeper or the accounts and hire new one restructure the thing cleaned it up.

Cliff Locks 19:18
It’s a millions of dollars worth of savings there.

Marcus Magarian 19:21
Oh my god. It was crazy and getting too specific on what the who the company is. They were not an American company outside. They were operating out of the United States.

Cliff Locks 19:31
What do you love about what you do? And what do you find most rewarding personally,

Marcus Magarian 19:36
at a place like Chatsworth, it’s kind of like a sandbox, you have a lot of free rein to do what you want. It’s very important that we focus in a very specific sector. So we were very focused on things like in the payment space, which payments means everything. It starts with payments, because it’s credit card processing, which became digital banking, which became things like you know, digitizing things like Western Union and things Like analytics companies, which is just, you know, data flows all about the law of large numbers, solving those puzzles for those CEOs is the best, the hardest part is getting cost that barrier where like, you don’t, you can’t tell the client that they’re doing something wrong, you have to give them the idea for them to come up with the idea and then solve the problem. But usually, it’s something that it becomes a difficult thing for people in positions of power, is that you have to do things in a way that makes it seem like it’s where we’ve transformed, we’re doing things very successfully. And we’ve been successful at it, we’ve been transforming those things. And it’s a lot of fun.

Cliff Locks 20:41
So it’s really a partnership between you and the client at that point. 100%.

Marcus Magarian 20:43
Okay, 100%. And the clients use it on an understand like, in the beginning, they’ll have an idea of how things are supposed to be done, when they actually go through it. It’s like, like, I’ve had my last deal, I, we had a, we had an issue with the lawyer, if the lawyer comes, once we pass the deal to the lawyer, it becomes no longer our deal, we have to be polite to the lawyer making sure whatever. And then you have to make sure the lawyer has experience, I’ve had three or four deals where like they hired the wrong kind of lawyer, or they mix the one lawyer to do something else. So simple things like, you know, registering things with the Department of State to transfer the share with the ownership of the shares, or declare that the transfer owner shares the state, you know, lawyers not knowing how to do that, because they’ve never done it never done it before, or lawyers creating adverse things in order to increase billable hours or, you know, sometimes before everything is happening, the client starts getting worried about things like fees. But and I always tell them, it’s like, you haven’t even sold the company yet. So you have a long, long, long way to go. And there’s the issue with clients, the buyer could go away. And then you have to, there’s a lot of massage. So it’s very complicated.

Cliff Locks 21:58
So you had to hold the deal together. That’s really what you do. But you have to make it seem seamless, very positive. You know, I’ve had the privilege of building three companies and selling them and you really, it’s people like yourself and your fine organization that allows these deals to get done. But there’s a lot of emotion involved in it, you know, especially for the entrepreneur. And it’s a privilege to work with professionals, and deals get done now. And that’s the exciting part. What will be your personal legacy?

Marcus Magarian 22:28
My personal use, just enjoy it. That’s it, there’s no The most important thing is not having ego in this business. So like, legacy just got to be make sure you have a good family that you pass the education along and move things forward. The culture of everything I think has changed significantly. Like one thing that Chatsworth used to be was a very private bank, the world has done Facebook and Instagram and Tiktok now and etc, etc. The way you have to present yourself as changed significantly. Like try joining a private club. With a family. We don’t have to just join Facebook and everything shared private clubs have social media things, putting pictures of their parties in there. Things like that. So old legacy systems, or legacy social circles have changed significantly.

Cliff Locks 23:15
I look forward to being back with you shortly for another episode of the private equity profits podcast. The show is produced by market domination, LLC.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

John Jennings

John Jennings – Balancing Customization and Scalability

John M. Jennings is President and Chief Strategist of The St. Louis Trust Company. In these roles, he leads the client service practice and is responsible for developing and implementing strategic initiatives.  John is a member of the firm’s Management Committee, on its Board of Directors, and also serves on the Investment, Risk Management and Trust Committees.  

John works closely with client families, advising them in all areas of wealth management. Prior to joining The St. Louis Trust Company as a founding principal, John gained varied professional experience in investments, tax, estate planning and trusts in the Private Client Service group at Arthur Andersen LLP and in the Estate Planning and Tax practices at the St. Louis-based law firm, Armstrong Teasdale LLP.  John earned both his Bachelor of Science in Finance and Banking (cum laude) and JD degrees from the University of Missouri.  

A past St. Louis Business Journal “40 under 40” honoree, John is a frequent speaker on investment, trust and various other family office topics. Personally, John is married, the father of two teenage daughters and an avid reader, skier, music lover and is vegan.  He serves on the Boards of Logos School and the St. Louis Community Foundation, where he chairs its investment committee. He is also a trustee of The Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra Endowment Trust. He is an instructor at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Daily he produces an “interesting fact of the day” which can be found at http://www.theifod.com. 

Additionally, John is a Forbes contributor writing about wealth management topics. https://www.stlouistrust.com/author/jjennings/

Transcript:

Seth Greene 0:00
Welcome to the podcast. This is your co host, Seth Green. Today I have the good fortune to be joined by john Jennings president and chief strategist of the St. Louis Trust Company. JOHN, thanks so much for joining us. I’m super happy to be here. So, all right, so for our folks watching and listening and tell us about the St. Louis company, St. Louis Trust Company, what do you guys do and who do you serve?

Unknown Speaker 0:21
Yeah, so we our multifamily office started about 19 years ago out of the ashes of Arthur Andersen. So, you know, I worked at Arthur Andersen for about four years. And when it was imploding in the wake of the Enron scandal, I was like, Oh, this is horrible. But looking back, selfishly, you know, personally for us, and I think other people that were there, it worked out really well. So. So being a multifamily office, we work with 60 client families, and we have 55 employees, so nearly a one to one ratio.

Seth Greene 0:51
That is awesome. That’s it? Yeah, that’s a great ratio. And so what is it that you think makes the St. Louis Trust Company other than the ratio obviously, stand out? And how do you differentiate yourself?

Unknown Speaker 1:04
Yeah, so I’m kind of to borrow from Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist, you know, he had this great book, zero to one and other venture capitals have talked about this, like, truly successful companies need to have a secret. And the definition of a secret in their parlance is what do you believe that most other people or businesses don’t believe? And if you told them that, you’d think that a sort of crazy so and pretty much every business, but especially financial services, there’s a trade off between customization and scalability. And the goal for most businesses, almost all of in the financial services industry is to increase scale. So for instance, we work with 60 client families and oversee and advise on about $13 billion of assets with 55 employees. So imagine just the profits, if we double that to 120 and 26 billion with the same 55 employees, we’d be like, where do we stack all our Benjamins? Right? What our secret is, is, we believe that if you are as customized as possible, and you don’t scale, that that’s a great business. And you can be profitable, and you can really be among the best in the entire country, or entire world, which would mean the entire solar system. And I don’t go further than that, because who knows what else is out there? Right. So

Seth Greene 2:35
that is an excellent point.

Unknown Speaker 2:37
So we want to be as close as possible for our client families to a single family office. And we’re able to do that, because we’re 60% owned by clients. So the main, you know, our main ownership group, you know what, it’s kind of nice when you know, they get a nice dividend. The number one thing is they want us to be customized and serve their families well.

Seth Greene 3:01
Alright, so that could that that’s very interesting, talked a little bit more about the and that’s probably another thing that differentiates you talk a little bit about the ownership structure.

Unknown Speaker 3:11
Yeah. So when we started, we decided to be a Trust Company, and we needed working capital, but we also needed capital to be a Trust Company. And so we turned to, you know, we turned our initial set of clients. So they were, they were early investors in the company. And as we’ve grown, we’ve had some other clients that have bought in and we are overseen by a board that is all, you know, all but two of us are, you know, clients on our board. And so, you know, clients that are on our board, buy in, and and it’s really, it’s really great. The other 40% is owned by, you know, our primary founder owns a chuck chunk, who’s now retired, and the rest is principals of our firm. So

Seth Greene 4:02
and, obviously, we’re not asking you to break confidentiality to, quote, disclose any names, but what types of families do you work with? Yeah, so who is an ideal client for you?

Unknown Speaker 4:14
So it’s interesting. So if you look at the size of our clients, you know, I don’t believe we have anyone that just made a lot of income, like we don’t have any wealth generators that are doctors or lawyers. And we don’t really have anybody that just saved money and invested in the stock market really, really to create great wealth. You have to have equity in a single company usually. So you put together your you know, you’ve taken a big risk, you’ve been concentrated, you put your own sweat equity into it, and you get lucky. So our client families, somebody did that. Whether we’re working with a first generation or you know, we’ve worked with we have sixth and seventh generation. We will So they, they either started a company, and then over time it was was sold, and sometimes they start multiple, or they were an executive at a public company and and was able to buy in or be granted a lot of equity. So that’s who our clients are, or their descendants.

Seth Greene 5:17
What are you finding some of the biggest mistakes they’re making are that they’re coming to you to help fix, or that they want to help your help to avoid?

Unknown Speaker 5:28
Yeah, you know, we get, we get a quite a few client families interested in us that realize that they need a higher level of customization and service. And really, at this sort of wealth, the wealthy families that kind of the waters we’re swimming in, kind of use a shark reference. So yeah, it’s, there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of sharks out there. But the level of wealth we’re dealing with, there’s no real just platform they can be on. So if you go to a lot of investment firms, they’re like, okay, here’s the way we do things. And the family needs to fit into how we do things. And we flip that on its head, we say, you know, we’re going to help you invest and do everything else in your lives, the way that fits your values and your goals. Right. So that’s, that’s number one. And number two, we see a lot of client families have just really been burned in the financial industry, even if they’re working with, you know, some of the really big name, you know, kind of gold standard firms, they just feel like, you know, the desire is the firm, the investment firm, just throwing things at them, just trying to sell them. And it’s all about their profitability, the investment firm, rather than what the family needs. And so we were having come in, they may still work with that firm, but they’re like, okay, we need somebody to help us to look at all this stuff and say, Okay, this makes sense that doesn’t, and we really start focusing on fees and taxes and things that the investment industry really doesn’t like to talk about.

Seth Greene 6:53
Okay, so you say you segued into the next question perfectly. So what are the services that you offer beyond the traditional investment management that they’re attracted to? They go beyond that Main Street offering, right.

Unknown Speaker 7:09
So you know, one of the we have three main lines, one of the three is, you know, investment management. And, you know, we do a nice job of investment management, but you can find good investment managers all over the place. The second thing we do is family office, and I think a great thing. And we sort of, you know, we started in 2002, we rode this wave, where, you know, people didn’t know what a family office or multifamily office was, you know, nearly 20 years ago. And so we really wrote this way we were, we were sort of early. And I think what’s great for investors is pretty much every, you know, financial advisory firm or investment firm out there says, Okay, we’re going to provide some family officers, I think that’s great. But it’s hard to do, if you have 100, you know, every advisor works on 100, or 250 200 200. accounts. So the way we do family office, is each of our professionals only works with, you know, five to seven families. So it really allows you to dig in and do bill pay and cash flow and help with charitable planning and educate kids, you know, the next generations about wealth and put together a strategy, and on and on and on and on. I mean, there’s just all these these ones off, you know, private jet charter, and, you know, should I lease or buy my car, or, you know, the next generation, I’m starting a business, can you help me on that, and we do all that. The third line of business is we can either be trustee, which is a really a convenience for our clients, there’s different reasons, they may need a trustee, or they had it, have a corporate trustee, that’s, you know, some big institution that they don’t feel like they’re a fit with anymore, and they can move to us. But probably a bigger thing is a lot of family members serve as trustee for trusts, and, you know, partnerships and things like that. And we help them be good trustees or, you know, managers of their LLC and do all the legwork behind the scenes. And, and there’s liability, you know, I, you know, there’s, there’s all these cases you hear, you know, both around where I live and nationwide about, you know, families Sue each other, and there’s, there’s real liability when you’re trustee of a family, family trust, so we help them with with that. And by the way, real quick, you know, even though our name is St. Louis trust, and we’re actually in the middle of rebranding to St. Louis trust and family office. So it hasn’t really been released yet. But we have clients in 33 states and some some, you know, family members live out of out of the US and, you know, our biggest growth areas have actually been on the coast. So, notwithstanding our name, we are not a local organization. We are nationwide.

Seth Greene 9:38
Understood. Now, you talked about a lot of the majority of the families be having a at some point in their history. There was a business that was started perhaps there’s some liquidity event or something that qualifies them to have the cash to work with a fat multifamily office like yours. How are you helping them because I mean, there’s a stereotypes and cliches of shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves in three generations, and how many businesses don’t make it past generation three? How are you helping them bridge that gap?

Unknown Speaker 10:09
Yeah, that is that is a real issue. And really what drives shirt sleeves to shirt sleeves, and you know, three, or four or five up here, stated different ways, is is a big part of that as math. So I’ll give you an example. So there’s a CLI family we’re with its, I think the main, the main ones we work with are depending on how you count fifth or sixth generation. And if you look at their, you know, this, this generations grandmother, so the grandmother and the grandfather, so they had a big chunk of wealth. And then they had six kids, and they paid a state tax. So the six kids then had one six of the wealth, less tax. And so the grant, the grandparents lived amazingly well, like they had just money just flowing it, the six kids, also very wealthy lived well, but it was a step down, right. And then those six kids, it varies between having two to six kids for each of those six kids. And then that drops down and there was a state tax. So a lot of it is math, that you know, even even if you invest well, and you control your spending, you know, some of it’s just math, and where we see some families not go shirt sleeve shirt sleeve, some of it is just because they don’t have as many descendants. So if the grandparents had one child who turned out had two children, you know, you can out earn that math, so part of it is just looking at the math and setting expectations, and just telling a lower generation, by the way, you know, even when all the money flows down to you, just because of the math, you probably can’t live as your parents did. And you definitely can’t live as your grandparents did. So that’s the first thing. So some of us just, it is what it is. The second thing is, is fees, and taxes are huge. So limiting fees, and taxes is is is really important. Investing well. And investing well isn’t just always, okay, I’m going to go out and you know, I’m going to find the next Facebook while it’s private or beyond meat or whatever, you know, Tesla and SpaceX is gonna be all this, this growth. I mean, that’s great. But that’s really hard to do. Part of it is just not making big investment mistakes. That’s, that’s, that’s a big deal. And then a state planning. So the way the estate tax laws are in wealth transfer tax laws are now you know, paying a state tax is largely optional, if you plan it early, and often, and you’re willing to do what it takes. And we’ve seen this time and time again, people that have 10s of millions of projected estate tax liability, and 10 or 20, late years later, it’s it’s zero. So, you know, we’ll see what the future tax laws hold. But it it really is optional. And all the time we see people that wait till they’re their 60s or 70s, or have a family owned business, and they’ve done little estate planning, and it can just be devastating, again, in terms of the math, and how that that passes down. So that was a long answer. I could talk more on it. But I think that’s it’s probably pretty good.

Seth Greene 13:16
How has the COVID pandemic affected your business and your clients?

Unknown Speaker 13:25
If you would have told me 18 months ago that this was gonna happen, you’re gonna have this pandemic, and we’re going to work virtually and we couldn’t visit, even our clients live locally because of, of health concerns, I would have been like, Okay, this is good, it’s gonna be devastating. And what has been surprising is how well it’s gone. So we’ve been able to, we transition remotely, you know, over a three day period last March. And our people just done a great job. You know, meeting with our clients virtually, and staying in contact with them, you know, we call them a lot. They didn’t call, it’s gone really well. Now, I will tell you that my analogy I use is both in terms of our company culture and working together and client relationships. I felt like we were running on battery power. So it was working. But I felt like the battery was degrading and training over time, right? And I wouldn’t want to do this for you know, two years or five years. And we are, you know, with the vaccines and almost everybody in our company is vaccinated, more people are coming back to the office. We’re bringing them, you know, everybody’s gonna start coming back to the office more The day after summer solstice. So he didn’t want to interfere with summer solstice celebrations, but it’s going to be the day after the summer solstice. We’re traveling to meet clients, we’re meeting him in person. It’s really fantastic to see everybody again, but again, I was just stunned that there wasn’t more of a disruption and how well it went. And I just think about him. What if this was, you know, even 10 or 15 years ago? And we didn’t have all the technology we do, it would just be a far different situation.

Seth Greene 15:06
Absolutely. How has it changed the investment advice you’re giving your clients?

Unknown Speaker 15:11
I don’t, it really hasn’t really hasn’t, you know, going in even going into the pandemic, you know, we’re big on on the belief that, you know, the financial industry, models risk and returns using the standard bell curve, or the normal distribution, the Gaussian distribution, that doesn’t work, that math does not work, you cannot take projections and and say, Oh, well, this is your downside risk, or this is what’s going to happen. So we’re very big on investing. Acknowledging the uncertainty of the future, part of that means having an adequate margin of safety. And so when we hit the nearly 35% doubt, and just over 30 days, so, you know, the the, the 30% down that occurred in it was the fastest drop in the stock market ever, even faster than some of the times in 1929 1930. So, really, No, none of our clients panicked. And some of them rebalanced and really rode the, you know, sold high and our, you know, take to liquidity and bought low thing. So, you know, they really did quite well, or did fine through it. Now, if it had gone instead of 34% down, if it had gone 70% down. Yeah, that would have been, you know, it would have been, it would have been more difficult, but it just really reminds you just the folly of trying to forecast when investment returns are. And a lot of the industry says okay, well, you know, and I did it. I am also a contributor for Forbes, I wrote an article wrote a few hours, I’ve written a few articles kind of lambasted this idea that you can predict and a common excuse that people give when they predict is, well, I couldn’t have foreseen that, I could, I didn’t know that there was gonna be a pandemic, or that, you know, going back that you know, 4% of the mortgage market of some Prime’s would be one of the main things that led to, you know, unraveled the, you know, the entire financial system, almost or, you know, who had on their, their, their scorecard for 2021, that a boat, we get stuck in the Suez Canal and further disrupt global supply chains, or that a tsunami would take down the, the reactor in Japan, you know, and these things happen. And it just reminds again, with a pandemic, you, you should invest in a way that’s robust to the unexpected. So it’s just, it’s really been a great lesson. And if you don’t mind me saying another lesson that just says home again. So the stock market and economy are not correlated, you can’t look at what’s going on in the world or the economy or even geopolitically and say, now I’m going to make investment decisions. And three days after, in retrospect, what was the bottom, I wrote an article in Forbes, and it was advice we were giving their clients and reiterate with the clients, that they’re just not correlated. And the point of the article was, we’re heading into a really bad recession, unemployment was spiking. The stock market was dropping, everything just seemed horrible. But the point was, is you shouldn’t sell out of your portfolio, just because the news is bad is going to get worse. Because they’re not correlated. And then what happened is, you know, turned around and had a, you know, 70 some odd percent gain from about the time that I wrote that article, and what people have said to me is, Jennings, how did you know, we had bottom? And I said, No, you don’t understand the point of the article is, I didn’t know and that nobody knows. And you should invest, like you don’t know. And a challenge we have sometimes is talking to prospective client families that want us to give them the certainty of, we know what’s gonna happen. Instead, we say, we don’t know what’s going to happen. And we’re going to invest that way. And we find that our clients that are very sophisticated investment wise, love that. And some investors that are less sophisticated, you know, don’t choose us, they want to go to the big bank or investment firm that says, you know, here’s our chief strategist, and you know, the s&p is going to be up 14% this year, and blah, blah, blah, blah. And they like that certainty. Because as humans, we don’t like uncertainty. If somebody says, I know what the future is going to be, we get this dopamine rush or like, we feel good. So, again, I’m just like, sorry,

Seth Greene 19:30
that’s quite a fascinating answer. When you are not serving as president, what do you I know that you are an avid reader? What are a couple of the best books you’ve ever read that had the biggest impact on your career?

Unknown Speaker 19:44
So, you know, the Black Swan by Nassim Taleb had a huge effect. I read that shortly after it came out in in 2007. I’d like to say that I read it was like, Oh my gosh, I see you know, 2008 coming, but let’s, let’s at least open my eyes to it. And it really last few years, one of the books that has, you know, just, I was just like, wow, just really, you know, knocked me as like I’ve learned so much and really caused me to see the world a bit differently. There’s a book called scale, by Geoffrey West, who was a physicist at Los Alamos, and then went over to the Santa Fe Institute, and was the head of the Santa Fe Institute, if you don’t want the Santa Fe Institute is it’s a academic think tank and their, their main area of research is complex adaptive systems. It’s how things interact, when you have intelligent agents and feedback loops and everything, which is really how the stock market works, by the way, why we that’s why we can’t predict it. But this book is all about scale, like power laws, it’s on about organisms and businesses and things and what a power law really is, is, I’ll use an example of let’s let’s use the example of book sales, you can look and say the, you know, that there’s, you know, how many ever books published in the USA, every year, it’s, you know, hundreds of 1000s. And you can say, the average book, you know, sales 10,000 copies. And if you think in terms of a bell curve, you’re thinking, Oh, you know, there’s, you know, kind of, if you’re listening, I’m sorry, I’m like drawing a bell curve with my hands, high in some low, but a lot around the $10. That’s not how it works. You have people like Stephen King, and JK Rowling, you know, you have this very small percentage of authors that sell a ton of books, and then drops off immensely, we have this very long tail of most books selling, you know, less than 2000 copies, less than 1000 copies. So that’s a that’s a power law distribution, or think about wealth. So, you know, if you take a, you know, you go to a concert venue that has like, 2000 people, and you go, okay, the average income of these are that, let’s say, the average wealth of these people is, you know, $250,000, if you average it, right body, and if you think bell curve, you’re like, oh, okay, but imagine if, you know, Bill Gates walks into the room, okay, the average just skyrocketed. And it doesn’t tell you anything about what everybody else has. And, and that’s the way wealth works in America, too, is at every stage, you know, you look at the top 50 versus the low 50. And then the top 10%, the top 1%. At every stage, there’s a few number of people that are massively out of range that that affect everything else. So this book is all about that is a little technical. Like I’ve, I’ve talked before about how much I liked this book, I’ve had people that have like I couldn’t get through it. So if you want to just really expand your mind, but it’s work scale by Geoffrey West.

Seth Greene 22:40
Great recommended patients fascinating interview, and anything else want to share that we didn’t think to ask you yet.

Unknown Speaker 22:46
Well, I would just like to, if I could plug my blog, of course, please. So I write a blog a few days a week, it’s called the interesting fact of the day, it really should be called what Jenny’s thinks is interesting, but I get a you know, it’s very well received. And it’s just all sorts of different things. Some some times as things on leadership, sometimes it’s as simple as its national Grilled Cheese Day, you should go eat grilled cheese, and, you know, today’s sent out as a rerun because my daughter guys, graduates from college tomorrow, and it’s on the five best commencement speeches. So it’s just a lot of different eclectic thing you can think you can find it

Seth Greene 23:22
at V th e.

Unknown Speaker 23:25
iPod, which stands for interesting fact of the day. So th e, i fo D calm, feel free to subscribe, feel free to unsubscribe. But just me, I find that people say that it kind of kind of tickles their interest in things. So.

Seth Greene 23:39
All right, well, this has been Seth Green with john Jennings of the St. Louis Trust Company. JOHN, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody for watching or listening. We’ll see you next time.

Sasha Grutman

Sasha Grutman – Identifying Ideal LBO Candidates

The Private Equity Profits podcast with Cliff Locks Episode 002 Sasha Grutman The guest is Sasha Grutman founder and Partner of Middle March Partners. Sasha co-leads the firm’s merchant banking and investing efforts. He has spent his entire career investing and advising high-growth financial services and business services companies that leverage technology to create sustainable advantages.

At Middlemarch, Mr. Grutman advises clients on business and capital strategy issues, has sourced over $730M of capital for clients, and serves as a board member for a number of Middlemarch clients and portfolio companies. He has deep domain expertise in specialty finance and transaction processing, sectors where he has been exceptionally active both as a merchant banker and as a private equity investor since 2002. Active with both private and public companies, he has participated in over $3.2B of transactions over the course of his career as a merchant banker and private equity investor.

Prior to founding Middlemarch Partners, Mr. Grutman served as a Partner at TH Lee Putnam Ventures, a $1B growth equity fund, where he co-led the firm’s financial services investments in specialty finance, insurance services, and electronic capital markets investments. Previously, he was a Managing Director at Citigroup where he oversaw the firm’s on balance sheet financial services private equity holdings as well as managed the bank’s $6 billion private equity fund-of-funds business. He has also held private equity investment roles at Goldman Sachs and Frontline Capital.

He began his career at The Boston Consulting Group in its Financial Services and e-Commerce Practices. Mr. Grutman received an MBA from the Wharton School where he majored in Finance. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Italy where he pursued independent research on Dante. He graduated from Yale University magna cum laude with a BA in Humanities. He holds Series 7, 63, 79, and 24 FINRA registrations.

Listen to this informative Private Equity Profits episode with Sasha Grutman about Identifying Ideal LBO Candidates

Here are some of the beneficial topics covered on this week’s show:

• What makes a good private equity dealmaker, fundraiser, researcher, associate

• important personality traits in finding value where there doesn’t appear to be any.

• The worst investment mistake he ever made, and what he learned from it.

• The most rewarding part of doing what Sasha does.

• Leaving a personal legacy

Connect with Sasha Email: sgrutman@middlemarchllc.com

Website: https://middlemarchllc.com/

Phone: (212-913-9660

Connect with Cliff Locks: https://www.investmentcapitalgrowth.com/