Private Equity Funcast

Jim and Devin spend an hour talking with Jay Bartlett and Scott Orleck from Parthenon-EY Ernst & Young LLP.  We've worked extensively with Jay and Scott on buy-side due-diligence projects over a number of years.  They share their experiences tackling questions workig with us around market sizing, growth rates, cyclicality, and the competitive landscape.  All of which serves to answer the fundamental questions: Is a particular industry a good industry in which to invest?  And is the target company the right company to buy?  Jay and Scott reveal the three main reasons why deals go bad.

The second episode of our trifecta covering the raising of ParkerGale's first fund.   This episode starts off where we left our intrepid heroes just after their first close in September, 2015.  Come have a listen as we talk about our decision to hire a placement agent and our marathon of trips in late winter/early spring in pursuit of capital.

Devin and ParkerGale Limited Partner John McCarthy continue their book club series with an investing classic, "The Most Important Thing" by Howard Marks, the legendary cofounder and Chairman of Oaktree Capital Management. Turns out that Marks most important thing is actual nineteen things -- come have a listen as Devin and John focus on three of them.

Devin and ParkerGale Limited Partner John McCarthy kick off their book club series with an unusual choice, "Rumsfeld's Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life" by Donald Rumsfeld. Some surprising advice in this book when we apply Rumsfeld's observations about leadership, business, and life to investing.

Devin and Jim spend an hour talking about the strategy and tactics of raising ParkerGale's first fund. This episode covers the pre-launch up to the fund's first close.

Jim and Alan talk about a scary subject on our Halloween episode -- Distributed Denial of Service attacks.  Two weeks ago the internet experienced an unprecedented DDOS attack against a popular DNS hosting service -- Dyn -- that blocked access to a huge number of popular sites -- eBay and PayPal included.  What does this mean for the small business owner -- should you avoid the Cloud altogether?  Come have a listen and find out.

We had a great conversation with Kevin Hurley, a recent graduate from Fullstack Academy. Kevin is a high school math teacher who caught the coding bug and decided to switch careers. He's exactly the kind of self-motivated technologist that will thrive our the tech economy. So, if you are thinking about jumping into the tech space, or you're a CTO looking to hire talent from "outside the box" -- then come have a listen. One more thing ... if Chevy Chase is reading this description, we assure him that in this episode there will be NO math.

Jim talks about all things social media with Cappy Popp and John Maver from Thought Labs -- a leading Digital Marketing Strategy company. We've worked with Cappy and John on a number of projects in our portfolio, and they know what it takes to develop a social media strategy. This is the first part of an ongoing series on social media marketing. In this first part we cover the basics of when/why/how you should consider a social media campaign for your company.

Alan and Jim spend a fun hour talking with Zeke Nierenberg, Academic Director/Chicago from Fullstack Academy. Fullstack teaches qualified non-programmers to code using an immersive 13-week program. Our bias going into this conversation was Alan's belief that you can't learn to code in 13 weeks. Zeke managed to school us both with Fullstack's point of view. Come have a listen and and decide for yourself.

Alan and Jim spend an hour talking with Ben Johnson, author of BoldDB and and freelance Go developer.  The Go language is a relatively new open source programming language (and platform) started by Google and maintained by a community of developers.  The authors promote "Go" as being easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.   Go is somewhat unique in that it compiles into a native operating system executable that can be easily distributed across platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS).  Is "Go" the right choice for smaller companies?  Have a listen and find out.

Devin sits down with Jeremie Bacon, CEO and Founder of Synap, to discuss Private Equity, Managing People and Movie Quotes.

Jim is back talking with Brian Walker, CEO of AE Marketing Group on the topic of Influencer Marketing.  Does it work for B2B companies?  Why or Why Not?   What types of "marketing" projects should middle-market business-to-business companies focus their precious resources on?  (If you have a dollar to spend, where should you spend it).  We branch out into a side discussion of trying to calculate the real size of a company's addressable market, building simple "market" data marts and fallacy of "Big Data" in marketing.

Alan and Jim spend a fast half hour talking when you should consider upgrading older pieces of custom (homegrown) software. You don't have to upgrade older software just for the sake of upgrading it -- and converting from an older language to a newer language doesn't make the software any better. The first of a three (or maybe four) part series on modernizing your infrastructure.

Jim and Alan spend an hour arguing about whether you should consider bolting an application programming interface onto older applications as a path to modernizing them. The conversation meanders into a brief history of application-programming-interfaces without getting too nitty-gritty -- suitable listening for Founders, CEOs and technologists.

The first of many conversations with Brian Walker CEO of AE Marketing Group.   We've found that Marketing is often the third wheel at small companies -- behind product development and sales.   Brian's team takes a CoCreation and Customer Experience approach to building and marketing products that gets the marketing function heavily involved in improving operations and products.  So, come have a listen!

We all know there are tons of Private Equity funds. So what are the ways they try to stand out from the crowd? We cover the four biggies: Focus, Size, Sourcing and Team.

Alan, Jim and Kristina talk about a rare phenomenon in technology -- slowing down sales -- intentionally!  Faced with the need to undertake some major software refactoring, we chose to put the cap on new sales while we raced to update the platform.  This caused real tension between the board, sales management and the engineering team.  Come have a listen as we talk about the details of this successful effort.

We recently had to find a home for a legacy client/server accounting application, running in a location that was far, far away.  The software came to us through an acquisition of another company.   Our ultimate goal is to migrate the parent and child to a single, unified cloud-based application.  In the near term, however, we needed to allow the remote team to access the software as per usual, right alongside the finance team back at headquarters. And, we needed to insure that the software was backed up properly and secure.   The solution turned out to be Amazon's WorkSpaces product.

Jim and Alan talk in detail about the Valley of Anguish and how to survive it.   All large projects (ERP implementations, software re-writes, data center moves) start out with heady expectations and hardy enthusiasm.   Inevitably, as your teams start tackling the stickier issues they slide down into the Valley of Anguish -- all willing to abandon the project and go back to doing things the old way.   As operating partners, we've had tons of experience in the valley -- and can help you and your teams survive and thrive -- and come out the other end of the project with smiles on their faces.   Also, we talk about Alan's really bad hat.

Devin and Jim discuss the seven deadly sins of private equity -- sins that will turn a good deal into a bad deal. -- Pride: Don't admit what you don't know. -- Envy: Make a bad acquisition. -- Lust: Overpaying for a deal. -- Greed: Trying to do too much, too fast. -- Wrath: Market turns on you. -- Gluttony: Taking on too much debt. -- Sloth: Failing to move fast enough on management problems.