Private Equity Spotlight: A New Chapter - Eric Hansen's Transition to Blue Sea Capital
2024-02-28 00:37:08
Private equity insights for and with top business builders, including investors, operators, executives and industry thought leaders. The Karma School of Business Podcast goes behind the scenes of PE, talking about business best practices and real-time industry trends. You'll learn from leading professionals and visionary business executives who will help you take action and enhance your life, whether you’re at a PE firm, a portco or a private or public company. BluWave Founder & CEO Sean Mooney hosts the Private Equity Karma School of Business Podcast. BluWave is the business builders’ network for private equity grade due diligence and value creation needs. To learn more, visit: https://bit.ly/3oPBjs8
Welcome to the Karma School of Business, a podcast about the private equity industry, business best practices, and real-time trends. I'm Sean Mooney, Blue Eyes founder and CEO. In this episode, we have a fantastic conversation with Eric Hansen, partner with Blue Sea Capital. Enjoy.
I'm very excited to have this conversation, and, at the risk of embarrassing our guests right out of the gate, we're going to be talking with who I think is one of the heads on the Mount Rushmore of the finance industry that really helped build and grow the middle market of private equity into what it is today. And so we'll get into all this, but let's kick it off, and I'm very happy to introduce Eric Hansen, who is now also a private equity investor with Blue Sea Capital.
It's very nice of you to say. I appreciate that. It's probably a little bit of hyperbole, but I'll take it. Thank you.
I've never been able to take compliments. My recommendation is sometimes you just have to take it when you've earned it.
All right. I will take it. Thank you very much.
So this is going to be a really interesting conversation, because you've seen from multiple vantages how this industry that many people don't really still even appreciate, this huge industry, has grown and developed from the earlier days of what I call the modern era of private equity. So maybe I'd love to kick off here, Eric, and just get a bit of your kind of your life story where you grew up. Sure. Tell us a little bit about the story of Antares and all these other things.
Sure. Yeah, you're right. It is interesting. It's been great being on the private equity side, being on the private debt side. I've had a unique advantage and a fortunate advantage to be able to do that, and it was a pretty unorthodox route into private equity, right?
Most people are going the investment banking route, and I didn't do that. My whole life story is not that exciting, but I'll hit some of the high points. I grew up in Peoria, Illinois, so downstate, and I can tell you, I got into business because of my first job. I was a restroom monitor at the Peoria Park District. And what is a restroom monitor mean?
It's a fancy title for the guy who goes in when the parks closed at nine o'clock at night and cleans out the restrooms.
Oh, my goodness.
And let me tell you, there are sights that I cannot unsee from that.
That's a character builder at an early age.
It is. I will always tell people when they ask me, the Shawshank Redemption, that movie cannot be real, because he could not have crawled through that door for 300 yards, because the stuff that I had to go in and out. anyway, I went for you with the unsavory details. But yes, it led me to say, boy, if I ever thought about not going to college, I want to go to college, and I want to get an office job, and I want to be in the business. That was kind of my formative years, when you think, I'm going to be a rock star and athlete.
Now, let's focus on school. So, as I matured and got through high school, I really wanted to be an accountant, and I know how that probably might sound to some people, and I'm not trying to denigrate the accounting profession, but for me, to be an accountant was to learn the nuts and bolts of a business, and how financial statements are made, and assets, liabilities, et cetera. As I said, I grew up in Peoria, and at the time, the University of Illinois had the number one accounting school in the country. I know it's still pretty highly ranked, and so, easy decision for me. In-state tuition, 90 miles away, so I went to the University of Illinois, go Illini.
Got my CPA, and went to work for KPMG, Pete Marwick, in their audit group, right out of school, in Chicago. Great job, great couple years auditing middle market manufacturing companies and financial services firms, but after a couple years, I decided, I don't think audits for me. I want to get into something a little more forward thinking, and so, ended up landing a job at Heller Financial in Chicago, in their Midwest leverage finance group, and what they did is, it was covered Midwest equity sponsors, and provided leverage buyouts for their platforms. That was my first exposure to private equity, and I started out at Heller by monitoring existing portfolio accounts, covenant compliance, tracking, and all the reports out on a quarterly basis. Eventually, made my way up to the new business group within Heller Financial, so it was underwriting new credits that were brought to us by a PE firm, and that's where I really said, wow, this is really cool, this private equity, because you could see from the start, okay, the process of the summary, then the meeting, then post-close, okay, how did they inflect the growth that they thought they would, and it just seemed really neat, and I know that's a very facile word, but neat is to be able to have that kind of control on companies.
I thought it would be really interesting to have that as be part of my career, and so I already had that, so I thought, this is great to be associated with private equity, So at the Midwest Leveraged Finance Group of Heller for four years, and Heller at the time was owned by Fuji Bank, and the Midwest Leveraged Lending Group of Heller Financial made up probably 80% of Heller Financial's profits, and myself, I was one of the junior members of the team, but some of the senior members who were really responsible for bringing in a lot of new business, they weren't getting compensated for that, and they were just an awkward model, and so over lunch, and over beers, and over time, there were a number of us in the group just talking about, boy, wouldn't this be great if we could do this on our own, and be able to prove out something, which was, is it a people business, are you doing business with Eric Hansen, or are you doing business with Heller Financial, and boy, we felt, it's not a brand-name business, can we take the relationships we have from the Midwest, and make it under our own umbrella, and then get out to the rest of the country, and have that same kind of connection with people. Barry Shear was really the mastermind behind the whole thing. He was probably 20 years my senior, he was a very senior originations person at Heller. His first job out of college was working for a gentleman named Sheldon Lubar, who was a very successful businessman up in Milwaukee, and Sheldon was on the board of MassMutual, and so we put together a business plan, took it, Barry got the introduction, presented it to Sheldon, and he got it, he understood it, and said, yeah, and so they seeded us with half a billion dollars on June 12th, 1996, and within six months, we had deployed all of it, and they really appreciated how we approached credit, they appreciated the depth of relations we had in the Midwest, and from then on, it was an open checkbook for us to then, okay, now we're going to go to New York, start covering those sponsors, we divvied up the country, and really, that's how it started. The 12 of us shared a space at the MassMutual office in downtown Chicago, there were four of us in three offices, and talk about stress, having four people in an office trying to call all your customers and say, hey, we just left, there's a new firm.
It was chaos, and we all were stressed, but again, it was a good stress, and we knew that we were going in the right direction. That's the founding of Antares.
That's a great story. These are things that I never heard. I started in private equity in 1999, and so you guys are already humming, but what was interesting that I always thought about you is you were one of the very first that was really focused on sponsors, because usually, you'd go to a commercial bank, and they had maybe a side channel, so was your hypothesis early on that this was going to be maybe 80-20 solely sponsor-focused? What was the target market that you were thinking about when you started?
100% sponsor. We did not want to do any kind of the stuff that maybe a GE Finance would do, which called on manufacturing companies to get that banking business. It was strictly, let's call on equity sponsors, and that was the whole focus.
Was there anyone else doing that at the time?
Not really. To your point, it was all banks. This is going to sound like it's very, maybe grandiose, but we were really the first private credit fund. when you really think about it, because you're right, even at Heller, we were lean and mean, but still owned by Fuji Bank, and you still had to answer to banks. We were in the forefront of the Unitron solution that you see today, of the 1% amortization that you see today.
Again, it was nice to have that flexibility that MassMutual gave us early on to be able to do these things, because we knew our sponsors, we knew that's what they wanted. We don't want to pay 10% amortization. Okay, how about 1%? You want to put your money back in the company. Hey, great.
We can do that. We want to beat senior debt through mezzanine, but price it blended. Yeah, we can do that.
How did you get comfortable with that? Because the convention then was you needed to amortize almost on a straight line over a five-year period. if you were cash flowing, and cash flow itself was provocative in its own right, versus lending X% against assets. How did you all build the conviction? Because now that's just standard, but back then, that was really provocative, like we're going to go and we're going to do something that no one's ever done.
It wasn't like we flipped the switch overnight. We saved it for our best sponsors. When I say best, the ones we dealt with before, knew and trusted, tried it out. As you think about the model, if you trust the company, if you feel your underwriting standards are correct, you trust the sponsor will do the right thing, I'd rather have more money out than paid back to me. It just worked over time, and as you get more comfortable, again, with the situation and our credit underwriting ability, it was, not to say it's a no-brainer because it was difficult, but it made sense from a P&L perspective, especially for the 12 of us who each own a slice of the company.
Yeah. No, it makes total sense, and that was always one of the biggest things. when we would pay down our debt, our lending partners. It's like, we don't want it back. Your company's doing great, and so if you've got a trusted company, a trusted sponsor, who's also backstopping it with their equity, in the world of private equity, the worst thing you could ever do is lose money, and so that was a really smart thing.
The other thing I'd love to get your perspective on is this whole concept of unit tranche. That was a whole new thing before as well, where you would have to go and get your senior, and then you'd get your mezzanine, and then you'd have to negotiate an intercreditor, and the whole time you got an investment banker going to you, and your hair is on fire, and you're trying to get your 100-page investment committee deck ready. It's just all this machination, so even this idea of unit tranche was so new. How did you all come up with that?
We partnered with Ares, who was a Mezz lender at the time, and so we kind of shared notes. We were really good in the senior portion, but could we underwrite risk-reward from a Mezz perspective, and we each kind of taught our way through it to get to that perspective. It was both companies' ideas, so we weren't really... To say that Antares itself did it, we had partners along the way. that, again, our first SLP fund, Senior Secured Loan Program, was what it was called.
It was about a billion dollars in conjunction with Ares.
I remember when you all came out with that. Our heads exploded, like, whoa, this is different and better, and this will make things a lot easier. I mean, I think those are two big innovations that played a big part in the growth and development of middle market PE, which was maybe back in the day, more of a backwater in private equity versus some of the larger cap funds. And I don't mean that in a negative way. It just was less known.
I think, from the day that we see, it's the biggest part of private equity. Absolutely.
I won't get to the private equity point in a second, but I don't know if your listeners will find this interesting or not, how we got to the name Antares. But I will tell you, that was a lot of work. We almost called ourselves Firethorn Capital. If you're a golfer, that's the 15th hole at the Masters, where the Masters often won or lost. Wrigley was thrown around, which I was vehemently against because I'm a White Sox fan.
But Barry Shearer, who I mentioned, brilliant guy, so smart, somewhat short on attention span. And he was flipping through his son's astronomy book one day and got to the glossary and saw Antares, brightest star. Shut the book. That's it. That's our name.
We're going to be called Antares Capital. Well, if we continue reading the definition, it's the brightest star in the southern hemisphere. So no one in the United States can see Antares. So we found that out as we were going through doing the logos. But I thought that was interesting.
People always ask me, how'd you get Antares? And so I figured I'd share that with the listeners. Maybe they'll find that interesting, or maybe they'll find it truly boring. So hopefully they find it interesting.
No, I love that. I actually never knew the story behind it. And I can personally appreciate how hard it is to name a company for Blue Wave. It took me months. And every time our attorney would say, it's not available in Delaware.
And then another one said, you can't get the trade name. And so I went through, in a typical private equity person fashion, every Greek god. Any kind of Roman emperor. And then, not so long ago, I was making fun of one of my friends at another firm. Every P firm, it's a color and a geological feature, a Greek god.
And then I realized I named our company off of a color and maybe a geological feature.
Blue Wave. Hey, Blue Sea.
There's a formula.
That's exactly right.
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It's really interesting. And I think this is an interesting segue as well, because there's maybe way. back in the day there was a linear path into private equity, right? And it was just, and that was it. And one of the things I think is most interesting about the industry is people are coming in from above and below and all these different avenues in versus just this one path.
And the industry is much better for it. And it reflects, I think, the maturation in the industry of P turning into an industry and a business, where there's multiple ways to get really exceptionally talented people, not only at the up-and-coming levels, but the leadership level. And so I'd be curious, what brought you to go from, in some ways, playing a key role, founding a segment of an industry, to then jumping over and saying, I'm going to now do the private equity investor buy outside?
25 years with Antares. Had a great time building. it. Made so many friends along the way. So many challenges.
I felt I'd done all I could do and was looking for another challenge. And so my bright idea actually was, that probably gives myself too much credit. I don't know if I was looking for another challenge. I said, I'm hanging up. I'm going to retire.
And that sounded really good on paper. until you realize that your wife says, hey, I married you for better or for worse, but not for lunch. And you're underfoot. And truly, at that young of an age that I made that very dumb decision, your mind just starts to go. You can only play so much golf and do so many crossword puzzles.
So I started calling around some of my buddies, who I call them buddies, because after 25 years, I made so many close friends at private equity firms across the country, and calling the ones that I really liked and respected and knew and said, hey, I'm not doing much. If you have anything you want me to help out on, happy to do that. And so I did that for a number of firms, of which Lucy was one of them. I had known the two founders of Blue Sea, Rick Wandoff and J.R. Davis.
I'd known for at least 30 years, J.
R. and Rick, both were at a predecessor firm. And I worked with them there. But Rick went to Anderson Consulting. when we started Interest.
We talked about doing QOV things. And J.R., the other founder, his mother and my mother actually went to high school together in Peoria. So I'd known the founders here for a long time. And in dealing with them, I also knew the kind of culture the firm was. I really enjoyed working with everybody, top to bottom, in my Interest days, and also with my consulting work that I did for them.
And as they were raising Fund 2 in 2020, there was a need for a partner on the industrial growth side. And they said, hey, you'd be interested. We've worked well with you as a consultant, worked well with you when you're in private debt. And it'd be nice, to your point, Sean, you alluded to this earlier, different perspective coming from the debt side. And things that I took for granted, they didn't.
And it felt good for me to be able to educate very smart people, obviously. I'm not telling them anything they don't know, but some of the nuances of the private debt industry. I said, yeah, I jumped at the chance because I thought, as I said before, going back to my Heller days, it was really cool to see the inflection that private equity groups can have. And as part of the lower middle market, we at Blue Sea are doing, the majority of deals are founder owned. So we can really take our playbook and put it on there and see the growth to get the company to where we think it's a fully functioning company, because it's some of these founder owned companies.
The founder is usually good at one or two things, right? They're good at sales, or they're technically smart, or they're financial people, but not having the full rounded skill set or team. And it was a great fit. Again, the culture, the ethics of this firm, knowing everybody top to bottom. It was just, I was honored to be asked, like I said, jumped at the chance to come on board here.
Yeah.
I love that story. And for whatever reason, and that's probably a good reason for it is, I've become a clearing house for people who have left a really successful career and retired for 30 days. And then they find me in part because I think they're like, this guy navigated what we thought was one of the worst midlife crisis moves in the history of private equity. The guy left a really nice gig to do a startup. That's crazy.
Right. And somehow he landed on his feet. So I need to talk to this guy. And then another one is we were able to help connect senior executives with the world, because that's our business. But one of the questions I always ask, in part, because I'm curious, because I've only taken two weeks off my entire professional life.
at a long stretch. It was my honeymoon. So that's the longest I've ever taken off for a vacation. I've always just been on the hamster wheel. So I'm curious.
in my mind, what would it be like just to not have to be on the hamster wheel? And so I always, my standard question I ask to everyone who goes through this transition from one great thing to another is how long did it take before you decided there's only so much golf you can play? And I'd be curious what your answer is.
Well, my gosh, it was probably two to three months, I would say. And that's when I said, okay, I need to figure something out. And then it took me about a month to figure out, look, you got a great opportunity. What do you really want to do? I didn't want to go back to private debt, just because I knew it, could do it, and just thought to myself, what do I want to do?
That's when I came up with, hey, I'll just call some of my friends, see if they've got anything to do. So it was probably four months, soup to nuts, before I really started thinking about that seriously. And then, boy, probably another year and a half until the opportunity with Blue Sea came up. But I was keeping busy with a number of different projects on that front, which was, it was good. It was actually a nice hybrid for a time to kind of, okay, go from 60 miles an hour to nothing.
And you say, okay, I'll start coasting on the two-lane highway now and do my consulting work and go back and do it. And then, once you get on the on-ramp back to the highway, that was about the right time for me. Recharge, can I take some time off, keep invested in business and in the industry, and then go back to, like I said, another part of the capital structure.
It's funny, the answer that you gave me is consistent with 80%, at least, of the people I talk with. They say, you got about three months before they start looking for the next thing. It's probably more than 80%. Our listeners out there, who are contemplating this thing, you got three months.
I'm glad I wasn't a long into that.
Well, it's three months and then they start looking. So you're like right in the middle of the distribution. And then you got to figure out what's next. So I applaud the transition here. So that'll be a good segue into maybe the next part of our conversation, where now you're back in it and you're like resharpening all your kind of senses and your perspectives.
And you've got this very unique perspective, looking at from essentially the entire stack of the capital structure, from the senior debt to the mezzanine, to the equity. And when I was in PE and I had to develop almost like a yardstick of this, is what I'm looking for, this more or less equals good, because it was just, you're looking at hundreds of companies a year, you had to have some mold. And so I'd be curious, as you've developed your perspectives over time, what are some of the most important traits that you'd look for when assessing a company as a potential investment candidate and partner, on whether this business is a good company or can be a good to great company? In some ways that's more important. What can it be?
Yeah. There's an easy answer. that's the building blocks. There's the intangibles. Easy answer for me.
And it's always been me throughout my career. And it's probably, frankly, from my lending background, because I know some of my colleagues here don't have the same be in their bonnet about concentrations, customer, vendor, product, geographic, all that stuff. So for me, when I'm just looking at this and that's a number one. Number two, I've got a database of kind of the subsectors that I cover. And, talking with the investment banks, I've gotten a nice scorecard where we can compare different metrics that are important.
They can also pretty easily screen things out. And here's a company I want to focus on. So then you go to that part that you're saying is that it's such an easy answer, but it's management. And it's not just management. It's not how good the CEO is.
It's how many holes are there? A big thing for me is also have they been together for a long time? I don't not a fan of that, because I want people to bring different perspectives from different companies, different thoughts, and not be an echo chamber. So that's the other thing that I really focus on. I look at the resumes.
I'll be candid. when I was in lending. I used to really skip through that, but I found it's really important because that also then tells me at least, is there the capability to inflect growth from a knowledge perspective, strategic perspective? And that is through organic or inorganic, right? You always want to look for an acquisition story.
That's the easy answer to see if you can do growth. But you have the team that can source it and do it. And how much time will it take of our team? And that's OK. It's just you need to kind of balance that out from an efficiency perspective.
And so the other thing that's really tough to do, and those of us who are older, it's a must that you learn to exercise the integrity of the CEO. And can you have a candid conversation? And do you feel like you're being given the straight scoop? And do you feel you can have hard conversations without defensiveness, obfuscation? Because, again, in life, you have bad days and good days.
So it's never going to be as great as it is the day you close. And it's really tough to judge. I've been wrong more times than I've been right. But I try and really take a very fine point of being able to make that judgment call in my mind whether I can have those conversations. I think the other thing I look at that kind of comes further on.
diligence is the timeliness and accuracy of the data requests. It's so telling to me. Sometimes it's, hey, can I get gross margin by skew? Sure. A week later, you got that.
yet? Not. We're working on it. And all of us in this business and in general investing, the bottom line is, can you make, what? are the financial results?
Which is great. But underneath that is the operational excellence that you need to have. Is it a nice swan swimming, just paddling fiercely underwater? And I say that because if you don't have systems, that means, to me, you don't have the ability to put in the right KPIs. If you can't have the right KPIs, you can't measure, and you can't inflect performance on your individual contributors.
You can look at salespeople, right? That's easy. But how is HR doing? How is IT doing? How are these other functions that are very critical to a portfolio company?
How do you judge them? And are you using the right metrics? We don't have the systems in place to be able to accurately judge that. Again, we pride ourselves on when we exit companies, we've got them where they're not only financially performing, but operationally, you don't have to go in and tinker with any part of the organization. And so I just think systems, the timeliness and accuracy tells you so much about the quality, not just of the systems, but obviously the team, and do they place importance on it or not.
Those are things that I've looked at, more so now that I'm in private equity than in debt, but I have carried on that kind of diversity angle that, for me, there's bright lines that I have mentally about diversification across all those spectrums that I mentioned before.
For our listeners here, Eric just gave a bit of a masterclass. So if you're one of our listeners, as an executive on a C-suite, either backed by PE or aspiring to be backed by E, listen to these things because he's right.
Oh, Sean, you're too kind. But please go on.
No, but I think a lot of that resonated with me. And I think one of the things that you've kept on going back is the team and the human capital of these teams. But it's by far the number one thing that we get called for are recruiters for executives, interim executives, organizational effectiveness, people, because no matter how much people say chat, GPT is going to take over the world, it's still the people that matter. And one of the things that I haven't heard really is the freshness of the team that you brought up. And I think that's a really interesting perspective, because I think many people in our industry have read the book, Good to Great.
And it's this classic, I think it's the best business book out there. And one of their tenets is you got to get the right people on the bus. And so often companies that I think just get stalled in good, just keep the same team in and they don't evolve, because it's comfortable. And, like you said, you develop this echo chamber and everyone can say, yeah, we agree. We agree.
We agree. And this bringing in this freshness as companies evolve is so important because, if you're figuring it all out, half the reason why I think every PE person reads so many books is because they don't want to figure it out themselves. Bring in someone else who's really good, who's already figured out what you're trying to do, but you don't have to build everything your own. And so I love that. And the metrics thing is also so important.
And the other thing I think that really resonated with me is do you have a CEO who can have a hard conversation? Because ultimately, when we get the calls, because they're making a change, they've lost trust in that two-way communication because they feel like they're getting managed and the results aren't happening. If the results aren't happening and you're getting managed in a way that's not truthful and open, that's not a basis for trust. You got to have that foundation. So I really like that as well.
And I think it speaks so much to get someone who can listen. And one of the things we used to do was intentionally, during our management meetings, challenge the CEO just to see how they'd react. And we were not trying to be provocative, but we'd just see how they react. And if they would respond, it's a good question. If they didn't know the data, they wouldn't make it up.
They'd say, let me get that information for you. Those are all really good measures. And so I'd love those points that you brought. And I think they're ones that everyone listening to this should write down. I know I will.
So when I have someone like Eric staring me down in future periods and I'm like, uh-oh.
I'm very scary.
So I think that was really great. I think, maybe as the next step of our conversation here, Eric, I'd love to hear, in the investment, you've identified, this company that does all these great things, has the opportunity to be even better. How does your firm, then, approach the value creation phase? What resources do you bring in to support the growth and development of your team, kind of symbiotically with each other?
For the listeners out there, we have three investing divisions, healthcare, aerospace, defense, and industrial growth. And you can chuckle, industrial growth, what doesn't that cover? But we take that seriously. We've got 15 subsectors, that we've done significant white papers on, 30 pages of things like what trade shows you need to go to, what are the companies in there, what are the drivers, what are the execs in the space, current and former. And we do that to have a prepared mind when we evaluate an opportunity.
We have a relentless focus because of that on developing our executive network. So with those white papers, it is all the things. that's like detective reporting, work, LinkedIn, you're Googling, you're figuring out, you're making cold calls, trying to see if that fits. And so we've got them within each industry subsector for industrial growth. You've got, hey, can this executive help me with this portfolio company?
I've got a great example of a company we closed in April. We had through two years, I've been talking to an executive. It's in the automation space. This gentleman is truly the godfather of automation. He's been in the New York Times.
He is working with this portfolio company. And you talk about inflecting growth. He has given these guys, the management team, so much more to think about, the avenues to go. Automation is a broad space, but what we're doing is more focused. And it's been really great.
I truly think that not only is our playbook, taking founders from founder-owned to institutional in a good way, as well as our executive network, are the two things we really bring to the table, as well as having relationships with groups like Blue Wave, who can certainly point us in the right direction if we need other advisors in any other capacity.
I appreciate that.
There's a reason why we have so much mutual respect and fondness.
That's one of them, not as many.
Well, just one.
I think that's really, those are great perspectives. And in particular, it's this idea of you're using a big mantra of ours is, and I think it really just came out of the private equity industry, using the word and not or. It's not this or that. We're going to bring in external resources. We're going to help develop the internal resources.
We're going to work as a team, all of that in concert with each other and with incentives that are incredibly aligned. And so I think that's a great approach to an industry that has become a really important engine to the, not only the US economy, but the global economy. So I think, maybe as we round things out here, Eric, I'd love to maybe come back to you a little bit. This is something where we're all going to dare to be introspective again. And that's okay.
All right.
We're in a safe place. And so I get the privilege of working with all these incredibly capable people who I pale in comparison to, and I say that with self-awareness. So I get to learn all these things. And so every day I learn things like, I didn't know you could do that. Why don't I do that?
How do I go back to younger Sean? And so I write an email that I called What I Wish I Knew. And every day it's like, how do I not know this? It's a humbling experience every day, at Blueway, for me, at least. And so I'd be curious if you could go back, knowing what you know now, going back to younger Eric, and say, here's a piece of advice that I wish I knew then, that full candor younger probably wouldn't have listened to.
But I'd be curious what it would have been.
It'd probably be buy Apple stock at 40 cents a share. As I think about that in more of a serious context, I think it would be do a better job of networking. It's not easy, right? When you're 20,, 21,, 22,, hey, at your university, there's this group coming in. There's 50 people.
You got to go in and meet and handshake. And I was horrible at it. I would rather go to cams for quarter beers than have to go do that. And even in my early 20s, I did a bad job of it. But I would tell the younger people out there that it is this business.
There's so many smart people in finance, in private equity, for sure. I think back to my career, Barry Shearer, who knew Sheldon Lubar, Starland Terrace, the person who brought me on to Heller Financial. I worked with it, Pete Markwick. This Blue Sea connection, because I knew Rick from networking with him a long time ago, and JR as well. And it's really those cosmic instances where you meet people.
And it gets easier. I will tell you. It's a muscle that, once you exercise it, it gets easier to walk into a crowded room and handshake. But I wish I would have done it earlier. I've been forced in my career that I have made some great connections.
But I look at some of my friends, and they just were on the ball quicker and potentially had more opportunities available to them in their careers. I have no regrets about my career at all. So I've been very lucky that I don't think I did a great job of networking and marketing myself in my early 20s, that I ended up where I am today.
That's fantastic advice. I don't think I figured that out until I was probably upper 20s, maybe 30s, probably. And in part, I'll tell you, I grew up as a really introverted kid.
You're doing a podcast now.
I know. Believe me.
You've evolved.
But this is a one-on-one conversation. But I still get heart palpitations when I walk into a conference. But what I realized, there's value in it. And you get something as well as give something. So ultimately, it creates energy.
Even for an introvert, where you go into social situations, it's usually energy depleting for me. But even as someone who, in general, would prefer to be in a one-on-one conversation like we're having, when you do it, ultimately, it does fill your tank back up. And you can find ways as an introvert to find those moments. It doesn't have to be going into a massive conference and being shot out of the cannon. And so that's how I figured it out.
But still, it takes effort and time. And I think it's great advice and certainly something that I wish I'd figured out. And I think I'm still figuring it out. Yeah.
I am too, right? I mean, it's not easy.
It's like I say, one of my sayings, life's a journey. It's not a destination. And I obviously didn't come up with that. But I live it. Yeah.
It validates my slow progress. So maybe, Eric, one other thing that I'd love to get your sense on, and we've talked about this before, is I think people in our world are voracious readers, collectors, sharers of books. that matter, because it helps us leapfrog our growth and development. So we don't have to figure everything out ourselves. That goes back to even the conversation we had about bringing in new people who've all figured stuff out.
I'd be curious if you have any favorite business or personal books that kind of resonate with you and some of the takeaways.
So I'm a big fan of historical fiction, but I will tell you that I also, we read serious all the time. So I hope this answer is probably not going to satisfy your question, but I'm going to answer it the way I want to answer it. And that is, we do read serious. We get books in and industry studies, and you have to parse every sentence. Does that make sense?
I think it's important to read for pleasure, to kind of exercise another part of the brain. So stay with me here. I'm a big rock and roll fan. And as a matter of fact, I was in a band in my 30s and 40s. For those of you who are in Chicago, I apologize.
If you ever attended one of our shows, you should probably have gotten your money back. But because rock and roll fan and was in a band in Chicago, right now I'm reading a book called A Loop Files, which is an oral history of the most outrageous radio station ever. is the title. And I think it was nationwide, but it was in Chicago. And it went from 1977 to 2018..
They actually sold to a Christian conglomerate. And their last song they played was Highway to Hell. And then I kind of send off present. But this is one of the first radio stations really that had the personalities of disc jockeys that you actually listen to. For those of you who are younger, believe it or not, there used to be three television stations.
There was not Spotify or iTunes or an iPod. So to listen to music or your favorite artist, your favorite song, you had to listen to the radio. And the loop perfected. the rock and roll wasn't being played that much early on. But they also names like that were syndicated nationally, like Jonathan Brandmeier, Stephen Gary, which is famous for the disco demolition issue at Comiskey Park, Buzz Kilman, Kevin Matthews, all their characters.
It's an oral history of that. And it just takes me back to my younger years in Chicago, which were a lot of fun. And again, these guys are syndicated nationally, but they were true Chicagoans. And they broadcast from the Hancock Tower. And it was just a neat time and place.
It takes me back. I highly recommend it for those of you who remember the loop, because I think it was syndicated nationally after they got really popular in the 80s and 90s. And certainly some of the disc jockeys who entertained me and were the precursors of podcasts that you're doing, Sean, you could have been a disc jockey. Drive time with Sean Mooney from five to nine. I got you on your commute.
It'd be a tough followership.
But for those of you who remember the loop or think about that, I'd highly recommend picking that book up. I'm sorry, Sean. Probably wasn't the business book recommendation that you wanted.
No, it's something I think it's a great point, because we all read so much serious stuff. You need to have those lighter moments. And then, maybe just for some of our listeners here, there was this thing in earlier days that was called the radio. And they had these different channels. So before Spotify, you would have that.
And it's still on most of your cars. You'll find it. I swear. But it brings me back where I came up through New York. This is in the 90s.
And we're in a cute farm at an investment bank. And someone would always have Howard Stern on in the morning. And eventually, it was first was earlier. There's music. And then they're talking.
Eventually, just began talking. But just the outrageousness of that time was so unique in ways that I don't think you appreciate until it first came out. And it was every once in a while.
It's funny you say that, because in the cute farm at Pete Marwick, it was, OK, Jonathan Bradmire in the mornings and Kevin Matthews in the afternoons. And you just kept it on all day. And I find it hard to believe we're that efficient, right? You're doing your work papers. And oh, it's so funny.
And I started thinking about it. But yeah, it is. Again, it was on the dial. It was 97.9 FM and 1,000 AM. I always remember those call numbers.
But that's part of the reason I think we work till 3 in the morning is because we lost the 8 till noon slot. Everyone's laughing in the cubes. Yeah.
I hope my former managers and partners at Pete Marwick aren't listening to this because probably claw back some income.
They're going to want some bonus money back. Yeah. And the other thing that I did love that you said is the whole historical fiction. So Killer Angels is one of my favorite books that describes the Battle of Gettysburg. But in some ways, I like it so much, too, because I would call it broccoli with cheese on it.
You're getting the facts, but there's a story to it. It's enjoyable.
And on that point, the most memorable one of historical nonfiction I've read recently is The Mosquito Bowl, which is by Buzz Bissinger, who did Friday Night Lights. And it's about World War II soldiers on Guadalcanal. They were all-American football players. And a bunch of them got recruited in the Marines. And they had this football game for these Marines before they went into battles.
It was broadcast on all the stations. It was all the all-American football players. And unfortunately, most of them end up perishing in the Pacific Theater. And again, it also recounts the horrors. It just sounds maybe cheesy.
And I don't mean it to be. But really, that generation, it is the greatest generation that went through World War II, because some of the stories that come out in that book are just harrowing. So if you like Buzz Bissinger, I like a lot. I think he's a really good writer. But I'd recommend The Mosquito Bowl, kind of the historical nonfiction front.
I think those are great. And my wife has become accustomed to my Amazon habit, having done these podcasts. Hopefully, they're consolidating to one. But there'll be two more boxes with those books arriving shortly. So, Kate, if you're listening, I apologize.
You gave her a fair warning.
Eric, this has been a really fun conversation. I appreciate the wisdom, the insights, hearing the story of, like I said, a pillar of the private equity industry that you played a really big part in. So thank you so much for visiting and joining us today.
Oh, Sean, it's been an absolute pleasure. And I really admire what you're doing with Blueway. But it's a lot of fun for me, too. So thanks for the opportunity.
100%. Thanks so much.
Special thanks to Eric for joining. If you'd like to learn more about Eric and Blue Sea Capital, please see the episode notes for links. Please continue to look for the Karma School of Business podcast anywhere you find your favorite podcasts, including Apple, Google, and Spotify. We truly appreciate your support. If you like what you hear, please follow, rate, review, and share.
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