How Brett Hickey Built a $Billion Firm From Nothing | Leadership & PE Lessons Every CEO Must Hear

Episode Summary:
In this insightful episode, Alex Rawlings is joined by Brett Hickey, the CEO and founder of Star Mountain Capital. Brett shares his unique journey from humble beginnings in Northwestern Canada to leading a multi-billion-dollar asset management firm in the U.S. With deep reflections on leadership, value-based investing, building collaborative ecosystems, and what truly drives sustainable success in private markets, this is a masterclass in private equity thinking.

Brett also discusses the strategic opportunities in the U.S. lower middle market, the implications of aging demographics, his risk-aligned investment strategy, and the power of culture in scaling a firm. If you're looking to understand how to build a high-performing investment organization from the ground up—and what books, frameworks, and philosophies support that—this episode is essential listening.

⏱️ Episode Highlights & Time Stamps:

00:00 – Welcome and Introduction to Brett Hickey
00:41 – Overview of Star Mountain Capital and its focus on U.S. lower-middle market private credit, secondaries, and private equity
01:12 – Key mistake PE firms make: passive asset management vs. active value creation
03:08 – Aging demographics as a key investment opportunity
04:05 – Valuation arbitrage in lower middle market businesses
05:05 – Reflections on a possible downturn: macroeconomic risks and “air pockets”
07:59 – Aging populations and structural economic concerns
09:53 – The importance of cash flow and capital protection
10:21 – Brett’s entrepreneurial journey – from launching his first fund at 26 to building Star Mountain Capital
12:41 – The S-shaped growth curve and persistence through innovation
13:40 – Brett’s data-driven approach to strategy and decision making
15:35 – Why aging demographics and inefficient markets create opportunity
17:08 – Biggest challenge in building the firm: People
19:30 – Aligning team culture and expectations through transparency and shared values
20:57 – Why Star Mountain is 100% employee-owned – benefits and challenges
22:54 – Building trust and long-term alignment through ownership
24:45 – Observations on asset management failures and strategic missteps
25:44 – What is the Collaborative Ecosystem and how it drives results at Star Mountain
27:34 – How peer networks like EO and YPO influenced the firm’s internal culture
28:31 – Leveraging insights between secondaries and direct investments
29:59 – Case studies, adjusted EBITDA, and forensic underwriting
31:18 – Using real business alignment as a differentiator in competitive deal processes
33:13 – Recommended reading: Brett’s top books and content on leadership and execution
33:41 – Never Lead Alone by Keith Ferrazzi
34:37 – Agility by Leo Tilman and General Chuck Jacoby
36:54 – Harvard Business Review and Rob Kaplan’s work on leadership
38:48 – Principles by Ray Dalio and how it influences Brett’s thinking
39:18 – A practical tip: triangulating decisions with deep experts
41:13 – Final reflections on value investing, risk management, and staying grounded
42:09 – How to get in touch with Brett and Star Mountain Capital
42:38 – Wrap-up and takeaways from Alex

🔗 Connect with Alex Rawlings on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexrawlings/
🌐 Visit Raw Selection: www.raw-selection.com

Transcript

00:00
Welcome back to the Royal Selection Private Equity Podcast. us today is Brett Hickey,  CEO and founder of Star Mountain Capital.  This,  we cover so much in this podcast from leadership to  leveraging your average five people you spend the most time with,  learning self-development, growing a firm, starting it from scratch,  all sorts.

00:27
diving into this podcast. I'm super excited to bring this to you. I've thoroughly enjoyed this conversation.  Let's dive straight in. Here's Brett Hickey from Star Mountain. Brett, if you can share a briefing sign to you,

00:41
Alex, I'm Brett Hickey, founder and CEO of Sturm Mountain Capital.  We are a specialized investment firm focused exclusively  on the US or middle market across private credit and secondary is predominantly  into a lesser extent. The third leg of our stool to keep it up is our private equity business. Perfect. So what one mistake do you see private equity firms or portfolio companies making and what would you suggest to correct them?

01:12
One of the things that I was going to be really interesting, assuming we do have a market downturn, Alex, is I think a mistake some people might be making is too passive of management where you find an investment, you make an investment, but how do you make sure you manage that investment to drive a successful outcome, taking advantages of opportunities or dealing with threats? And I think that's across private

01:41
more so than private equity, but I think there are private equity players as well that have been more in an asset gathering mindset, less thinking as principal risk management. And it's tough not to in some cases because the  table talk with everybody, what's to your AUM, what's your AUM, right? That's what everybody loves to talk about at the cocktail events and stuff. so, you know, they don't say how much capital would be protected.

02:10
You know, what kind of returns are you generating? That's too intrusive.  But the reality is that's sort of what we should all be focused on is capital protection and returns ultimately as fiduciaries. Yeah, it's the same thing in executive search. You meet with everybody and all they do is ask you, how big's your head count?  nobody cares about profit. Nobody cares about turnover. As long as you've got a big head count, it makes you  feel good.  what  you said about the kind of opportunity side.

02:39
Um,  what do you, what do you mean by that? What are some of the examples of the things that you've seen that are opportunities that you've maximized?  One of the  most obvious plays I think in the developed economies, certainly in the U S where I'm based and similar for you, uh, in the UK and in Western Europe  is the aging demographics that are upon us.  Uh, I think it's been coming along with such obviousness that it doesn't

03:08
cheek people's attention. It's not something new or sexy or something like that. But ultimately, if you think about the volume of people that own smaller private businesses that are now motivated sellers because their adult children don't want to take over their businesses or maybe they don't want their adult children to take over their businesses. So that could be a good match.  But ultimately, it's it's a huge opportunity as an investor. It's always great to have a motivated seller.

03:38
And then when we think about basic laws of supply demand, the lower middle market companies  with far fewer intermediaries and investors to help create an efficient market makes the valuations lower. If you can grow those companies organically or through add-on acquisitions to be what I'll call a middle market business, the market is more competitive. Basic laws of supply demand kick in.

04:05
just like gravity, valuations are higher and you've got evaluation arbitrage that you can systematically take advantage of. So think that's one of the opportunities. The challenge on paper, it's all pretty obvious and straightforward. The challenge is you got to deal with people, integrating people the right way, dealing with customers and so forth. And  as you know, Alex, I think some people underestimate the importance of how to tactically deal with these things.  And that gets into expertise and operations and whatnot that

04:35
I sometimes people underestimate  the importance of doing things the right way, but ultimately if you can, I think that's a huge opportunity for people.  takes some grunt work and rolling up the sleeves, but when we think about alpha generation, I think one of the best ways to generate alpha is where you have, you know, resource complexity and expertise that's required.  You referenced,  like, if we went into a downturn, I think a lot of people at the moment,

05:05
especially in private equity field that that's probably already here. They're either sat on capital they can't deploy,  can't raise capital  or can't what would be my third? Sat on capital can't deploy, can't raise capital. just go with two. What's- Probably realizations would be the other one that they're chat. the one I'm thinking. Yeah, the whole exit thing. That's fairly important. As if they can't sell their assets. Absolutely. So what's your take on-

05:31
What makes you frame about a downturn is I'm not expecting you to be Mystic Meg and give us the whole economic cycle of what's going to happen and predict it. And if it is Brett, let's do it. Cause I'll, I'll be delighted to hear that as we all would, but what's your kind of take on things and why reference that? So I'll start off with saying Alex that I've been wrong for a long time around this. maybe when I give you this, uh, you know, thoughts, perhaps you should just go, go in the opposite direction. But we think, uh, there are a lot of.

06:01
macroeconomic tail risks that continue to get to be bigger and bigger tail risks.  As we look at the public markets, I think there's a meaningful enough dislocation between public market valuations, especially in the US, relative to the economy. When we look at the economy, things actually look in reasonable shape. Inflation numbers just came out, there continues to be inflationary pressure that will likely continue to have pressure to keep

06:31
rates higher from a  Fed rate perspective.  And as we think about the growth, we're still seeing reasonable GDP growth as well, albeit slowing. I think there are things that are less factored in in the tail risks that I almost think of as air pockets. When you think about air pockets, if a couple of them combine at the same time,  the plane can drop pretty far  in the sky.

07:01
And if there's a confluence of air pockets that hit  and consumer  sentiment deteriorates, that's almost a binary flip of the switch. We saw that, for example, with Silicon Valley Bank, where when consumer confidence was lost, boom,  people start ripping out deposits and things drop fast. We saw it in the high yield market a little bit after that happened, high yield rates spiked and then subsequently came down

07:30
You know, very aggressively. what concerns me is that we have aging demographics,  um, shrinking populations in place like China, the U S and China collectively make up the vast majority of global GP and they're both  facing similar dynamics that way, obviously very big differences, but there are some systematic differences that way. So to me, that's concerning. I think some of the aspects around the world around.

07:59
costs and inflation, if you start to look at the dispersion  of wealth creation and those that are struggling, that gap continues to widen.  And the people who are struggling, that's a bigger and bigger gap. You see the civil unrest globally around that, whether it's in US politics, European politics, your flavor.  You see a lot of this civil unrest around different things.

08:28
It's hard for me to imagine a lot of these different challenges not eventually becoming more meaningful. think that some valuations  people have become a bit complacent to  in  challenges that are happening in the world. And they say, that's okay, I'm all in. And I think some of that is because of demographics. We haven't really had a recession. And I say we haven't really had because there was a COVID technical recession, but that was so heavily government-stimulated.

08:57
that it didn't have the normal effects of cooling the economy like a regular recession would. So if you look from 2008 to now, this would be by far the longest expansionary period in US history. The second longest one was leading into 01. And you look at the stock markets continuing to blow through all time highs. I think that things could fall.

09:24
and could take hits that then all of sudden people get scared. right now momentum is still very bullish. Some of that again, I think is a bit of complacency, but if that pivots into fear, there's a lot of businesses that are not cashflow positive companies that rely on other investors being willing to write checks to keep them alive. Right? And there's a bunch of companies in the S and P 500 that my guess is investors don't know about and don't realize.

09:53
How many them are unprofitable? Nevermind your venture capital stuff and the areas that you sort of anticipate those challenges be. But when  economies get challenged, cash matters. Cash flow matters. There's a lot of things that have enterprise value, but the cash flow metrics are not great. That concerns me. Classic of cash is king. So if you don't mind me saying

10:21
You've obviously fairly, well perceived to be fairly young, you know, you might've just aged better than, uh, than I have, but for founder, you know, firms 15 years in the, in the running, tell us a little bit about  the, story and the journey of building up star mountain capital. Sure.  And it's funny, the age thing,  I ask friends of mine, what's the sweet spot? Well, when do I go from being young to old? I just want to make sure I know where's that sweet spot so I can really relish those days or all of sudden somebody's is old. So I turn.

10:50
47  next month and maybe I'm getting into that sweet spot, but ever my barber goes to clip out a couple of grays I'm like no no leap those inch like why because I look too young as they should like okay usually people aren't telling me they want to look older  But all all kiddied aside I joke with my chairman Brian Finn that ran cred Swiss's Business and he balled it early in life. I said that probably helped you right you looked older earlier. Probably good the so I

11:17
My wife's happy with this, but not sure it helped when I was young running my business. So I actually launched my first fund when I was 26 years old and restructured that business and launched Star Mountain 15 years ago. is our 15 year anniversary. roughly four and a half billion of assets today. Not accounting for other co-invests and other things provided with other investors. I'd love to say the journey looked like a good old fashioned hockey stick growing up in Canada.

11:46
more of an S-shaped curve, and I think that's similar to our conversation earlier, Alex, on portfolio management. My view of the world is that you want to have smart strategies in what you're doing,  and then you have to realize that anything that will be innovative is going to be difficult. And almost by definition, if you think you're doing something that's reasonably innovative and differentiated and it's easy, you're probably missing something. And so at least that's been the way that I've  helped.

12:13
push myself and keep a silver lining with the challenges, but I think ultimately in the lower middle market replay, it's very labor intensive, it's very resource intensive. Those are challenges, but those challenges also create barriers to entry and that allows for supply demand benefits. That allows the opportunity to create the less correlated investor returns for investors and alpha ultimately. So I think my journey has been about have a great strategy, work really hard.

12:41
try to capitalize on opportunities when they're in front of you, mitigate challenges, you know, when they're upon you, um, and keep that S shaped curve, you know, moving its way up into the right. So what strategies well used in private equity as it is in any business, how do you know that you're on the right strategy? What do you do to protect yourself against being on the wrong strategy?  I always look at things, Alex, from a data driven perspective.

13:10
You know, I grew up in a small town in Northwestern Canada, about 10,000 people. And my mom died of cancer when I was  six and my dad was a  high school teacher.  And  the good news about that unfortunate thing was that the, the, uh, academic community was really supportive. So spending time with my dad and around all the other teachers, was very appreciative and thankful as well as extended family that  helped out. But ultimately when I came to the U S it wasn't.

13:40
Hey, here's the industry my dad worked in or somebody else, and here's just the path I'm following. I came in very  naive. I worked on the oil drilling rigs for a year, paid for college, used to speed skate on the national training team in Canada. None of those things have any  linear path to what I'm doing today. And so when I moved to the US, it was to work for a city group at the time, the largest financial institution in the world, within their financial institutions, Invest on Banking Division.

14:08
And I was very fortunate to have the important role of fly on the wall and modeling guy  in different meetings, because we got to just seeing an enormous amount of data, enormous amount of information. And within there, that's where we really started to develop our strategy for star mountain, which is you look at basic laws of supply demand. Where is there a challenge? Where is there a need? How can you develop a solution to that? That's a real value.

14:37
Um, as, one of my, uh, former professors, uh, Rob Kaplan from, you know, Harvard business school would say, you know, you have to be able to identify the clear challenges that your business is solving and how are you uniquely differentiated from your competitors. And that's not easy to do, um, especially in asset management, where there's often a lot of people that look very similar. Um, and it's not an environment where only one can survive. And there's a lot of different specializations and so forth.

15:07
But for us, it is really about looking at the aging demographics coming, the challenges of, you know, the big investment banks not creating efficient markets. It's harder to find deals. It's more resource intensive to underwrite. It's more resource intensive to manage. Those are all challenges from a business owner P and L perspective.  Um, but ultimately the aging demographic has an enormous amount of people that, you know, are motivated sellers.

15:35
And then you've got a clear valuation arbitrage going from, you know, supply demand of capital being, um, less efficient into more efficient and in any asset class that just drives pricing, right? Whether it's oil and gas or cars or bones or private equity, right? It's all kind of like gravity to basic laws of basic laws of physics. And so that's really what I'm all about. Alex is I try to have very well called smart.

16:04
beta strategies and then build business models to be able to drive and extract alpha in that smart beta. What I don't try to do is say, we're smarter than these big guys that are great and we're going to take them head on and I'm smarter than they are. I've just never viewed the world that way. We just really look where are their challenges, how can we create solutions for investors and business owners and try to build a business model that's hyper-aligned and have everybody just like a great

16:32
sports team or anything else really driving hard to the same end objectives in strong alignment with our investors. And thankfully that's worked out well for us. So 26 cent will be first fund. And then obviously that end of being Star Mountain Capital. As we look at the actual building of the firm and the infrastructure and the people, what's been the biggest challenge for you building this asset?

17:02
building this organization and getting it to where it is today.

17:08
people. Probably probably one straightforward word at the end of the day and it's not that people are a problem. It's finding the right people that  are desirous and capable of being on the right journey with you. So our journey at Star Mountain is what I tell people is a very growth oriented journey. If you're in a phase of life where your primary focus is just short term current cash

17:37
And that's what you want to prioritize because of whatever reason that's going to be less of a journey. We're more focused with our investors, creating value with them, being hyper aligned with them. And therefore that's where, you know, the vast majority of my capital or 95 % of my net worth is invested in what we're doing. And I want people that are investing alongside my capital to drive value and protect.

18:04
value and that's  what our investors ultimately value as well.  whenever we do have a downturn one of these days, you'll see  why that matters. It's often harder to appreciate the importance of that when everything's sort of up and to the right. And I think the days of investors appreciating the importance of real fiduciary risk management, capital protection  will be upon us. for example,

18:31
2024, we had a record year of realizations. So you talked about earlier, one of the challenges some of the private equity industry is having is not being able to realize investments. And partially that's because some valuations may be a little bit inflated. Somehow other investors are not willing to buy those assets that they want to sell. So I have to think things like EBITDA adjustments that are embedded in face value valuations, that there's probably things to be unpacked there.

19:00
We haven't had that challenge. We've actually had the inverse  as we have had the first half of 2025 as well. And I think that that's really being focused on value oriented, you fundamental investing. And that means that, you know, we're not tripling our business overnight. We've had very nice growth as a firm.  Sometimes I feel like we're growing at a good pace. Then sometimes you look and see somebody else and it feels like you're standing still.  But ultimately it's about

19:30
creating good value, keeping that value oriented mindset. And so you got to find people that understand that, believe in it, are aligned with it. And then how everybody works together as a team, right? Sort of like a puzzle and you well know this, but all that comes down to, I think, being very clear in what your business plan is and the type of people that fit it. And what I try to do is be as transparent as possible and really press it to say,

19:59
Here's who we are, here's what we stand for.  This is what I expect to deliver to you. This is what we expect you to deliver to us.  And  really try to help with the self-selection of the people that say, hey, I want that. I want to be part of the Starr Mountain family. I want to be aligned with my teammates. I want to be aligned with my investors.  And there's probably some people that are incredible people that that just wouldn't fit.

20:27
Right? Where they say, you know what? I'm just, I'm all about me. I want to be a superstar individual athlete, if you will, versus a team player athlete. And, and I think as a business, you just have to be very clear in what works and how you work in a team centric business model.  Um, and as some of my professors and others have told me that multiple cultures can work, but you can't be, you know, co mingling them really, you've got to be very clear and intentional.

20:57
in your culture to attract and retain and motivate people that are going to work well together in that team centric environment. So talking about team, I know you from your website, you guys have opted for a hundred percent employee owned firm. What, why have you done that and what's been the benefits of it? Well, I can talk a lot about the challenges of it in earlier days, Alex, that's for sure. Um, you know, in, in the early days it was tough.

21:25
And I made a cognizant decision. Um, I knew the risk and it's interesting. A lot of people say, know, you launched your first fund, uh, 21 years ago when I was 26 years old  and they say, boy, that was risky. And I said, well, define the word risk to me. People are, well, what do mean? So we'll just try to define, well, what do you think this risk? And most people get to, well, there's something I can lose.  Hey, well, when I'm not married, don't have kids, don't have any money. What do I have to lose?

21:55
I have earning potential of another year in investment banking or something.  And so my view actually is I didn't really have all that much  at risk because I didn't have all that much to lose.  But I also appreciated that my probability of failure was probably very high. But I was okay taking that quote unquote risk because that risk reward was sort of asymmetric and I could do that. But a big part of my vision

22:24
was not because of a desire to try to be, have some extraordinary wealth. I wanted to build a firm that was a culture that I wanna be a part of. And what I'm proud of saying today is that multiple people that were, you my non-family, best men in my wedding, are partners of mine today. I've been working with one of them. We've been investing together now for 21 years since the beginning. Another one's been with me full time for 15 years.

22:54
You know, having real partnerships, real trusted relationships where you trust each other, you work together and you work hard. We created our star values, our S as shareholder, T as trust, A as accountability, R as respect within Star Mountain. And that trust factor is just so critical to  building and running the business. And so as part of that, aligning interests. So in the earlier days, Alex, when we didn't take investors to help us launch the business,

23:23
It was tough because we had to operate with a shoestring from an operational budget. But my view then as well was if we could do that, we'd get to where we're hopefully at today, where all of a sudden we can attract and retain incredibly talented people. First is what sometimes happens is you take a bunch of outside capital day one, gives you more operating budget that helps you get talent early. But then as you grow, there's no more equity economics left.

23:53
to align some really incredible people. And so again, it was a risk,  but a calculated one with the hopes of getting to where we're at today. And if you look at different people that we brought on to our firm  and aligned, it's incredibly powerful position to be in because  some of the smartest investors in the world want to be able to be aligned.

24:18
in building the business together. They believe in themselves. They believe in their capabilities. They say, look, I want to be a partner at Star Mountain, not an employee.  And I think that helps me attract, retain and motivate  some of the smartest investment talent out there. Obviously there's lots of great people in the world, but that's again, sticking to our knitting. And that's why I  did it. And when I started my career at Salton's Barney, was doing asset management M &A.

24:45
In there, I observed a lot of things from other managers that worked and didn't. I think one of the challenges in our industry from a learning perspective  is  everybody loves to talk about the wins and the successes, right? In the old adage that a success has many grandparents and failures or that was somebody else's deal, somebody else's fault, so on and so forth. And  through that lens, I was able to see a lot of businesses fail, strategies that didn't really make sense.

25:14
partnerships that didn't really work well together.  And  that was very formative to me in my early days.  it's not only how do you achieve something, but how do you avoid something? I'll stop there Alex, hopefully it's helpful. No, it is very helpful.  And congratulations on the journey and everything you've got through so far and bringing that together as a firm people and leveraging that to try and create some differentiation because  anything in financial services, particularly private equities,

25:44
becoming increasingly competitive and everyone's having to differentiate. And that's clearly been one way that's worked for you guys. tell us what is, what's the collaborative ecosystem? Our collaborative ecosystem is  back to the point of strategy. we,  when we looked at where the challenges and the opportunities are in the lower middle market, he said, we want better data, information, resources, and relationships to ultimately drive.

26:11
you know, superior end results was our target objectives behind that. And so we said, well, how do we create an environment  that is also very technologically driven? So we have a very big technology team, which is quite exciting today because our ability to have accelerated through COVID thankful to our tech and our tech and business process team. And now with AI and how that's helping a lot of parts of our businesses and portfolio companies is pretty exciting.  But

26:39
Ultimately, the collaborative ecosystem is about how we as a firm work together and how we work in concert with our portfolio companies. So for example, we have a big CEO offsite that we do. Having been a founder at a young age, I started in organizations like the Entrepreneurs Organization back when I was 26 years old. I've been in the Young Presidents Organization now for over 17 years, I think. Another organization called CEO.

27:09
And that world is all business owners and founders and it's how do we work together? How do we collaborate? And in that environment, you know, I really learned a lot. And sometimes the financial institutions industry is not the most dynamic and innovative industries like technology often are. And so I'm fortunate to have a lot of friends that are very successful technology  executives, founders of businesses.

27:34
really took a lot of learnings from them and how do we all work, how do we work together? So for example, getting all of our portfolio companies together,  CEOs, separately CFOs, board members and stuff like that to say, let's get together, let's share challenges, experiences, let's bring together our data-driven information so that collectively we can all achieve more value by collaborating. Another example of that is with respect to our secondaries business and our direct investing business.

28:03
taking all the information and learning. If you think about secondaries, people refer to investing often as an apprenticeship style business. Well, in secondaries, if you can get real deep granular detail on the assets, it's basically case studies, right? So thousands of case studies I've been through in addition to the, you know, or 250 direct investments that I've done in my career.

28:31
taking those thousands of learnings and how do we build together? And we're now actually building into AI bots and stuff like that, which is pretty cool. We'll see what it yields one day, but at least the concept is fun to work on.  But it's taking all that information and say, how do we collaborate? So for example, if you're on our direct investing team, Alex, we're gonna take the insights and information that we gained from the secondaries to bring that to you. So if you're looking at a pet hotel boarding a grooming business, for example, we're gonna say, well, here's a bunch of other insights on

29:00
margins, industry trends, challenges, opportunities that we're observing there to benefit. Now, if you're on our secondaries team, you're doing a top-down analysis, we're gonna connect you with our industry experts on the direct investing team to say, well, here's what their team, and when you're unpacking things granularly, really watch out for A, B, and C, because sometimes people are trying  to take corporate-level earnings and adjust that EBITDA.

29:29
Right. And, you know, as we all know, the word adjusted EBITDA, I love to say, go look online and to honor the late Charlie Munger, look at what he says, replace the word EBITDA with. I won't say it on your podcast, but there's a little fun fact for people to dig into. But ultimately it's, it's between sort of buyer and seller, investor and business owners to negotiate how you define that. Well, when you're underwriting something, if you don't understand that or have the ability to dive into it,

29:59
you might think you're getting a great deal or a bad deal, it could be the polar opposite.  And so that's where collaborating on knowledge is valuable for our investment teams  and for our portfolio companies, for example. And we really try to have people live by core tenants,  just like our star values. It's the same thing, collaborative ecosystem. And we try to attract businesses that we invest with that say, I'm not perfect.

30:27
I want to learn, want to grow, I want information just like I want. I just brought on Peter Scatturo as our vice chairman that was the  CEO of US Trust, which is sold to Bank of America, ran City of Private Bank and ran the global wealth management business at Goldman Sachs with a lot of knowledge. And I gave him economics right from my wallet  because I want...

30:52
his information. want that alignment. want that knowledge. want that leadership. I want that skill. Same with Scott Kudo, who I'd recently hired as a president, you know, that was running a $700 billion roughly asset management business as the head of Columbia Threadneedle for North America. Curtis Glovier is our chief investment officer that was senior investment committee member of Fortress for a decade. That gets into having economics to bring people like this in.

31:18
But it also, I think is authentic. So when we're talking to business owners about working together or even negotiating economics saying, well, is it worth us having these kinds of economics with you? We don't want to win deals by providing the worst economics. We want to win deals because we can be a value added partner to business owners. And that helps us drive our alpha. And so it all sort of ties together, Alex, around collaborative ecosystem and value system.

31:47
internally and externally. That's great. think there's certainly a lot there that lot of private equity firms could take. And I think the investment in what's worked for you really well of those, I'll just call it,  references collaborative ecosystems, but seeing those kind of network groups and then going, hey, I want to surround myself with great people. I want to learn from that. And then bringing that into your actual firm  and seeing that work has been,  I'm sure has been absolutely great. think we here try and drive that  L and D type culture and

32:16
self-development, self-improvement and being, know,  Jim Rowan's, you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with kind of framework.  Um, and I think it's great that you bringing that in because no doubt from companies that you invest in will be attracted by that. Your LPs will be attracted by that. And it's that differentiation level and equally Brett, you've got obviously an absolute bag full of passion for what you do. So I'm sure that brings, uh, brings the icing on the cake. It was tough when you started now it's fun.

32:45
Like when we've had people talk to us about different things, like, this is the fun part of the biz. We now can have big data AI teams. We can have big offshore teams in India. We can have people in, or 20 cities across the US. Now we can actually do some pretty cool things. Earlier on, it was all ideas and thesis and philosophy. Now, now we actually have real resources, which is a lot of fun. Yeah. Once you work on the model and you can, uh, you produce the capital to reinvest and build it, it becomes a little more of something.

33:13
So aside from  the kind of collaborative ecosystem as you coin it,  what do you read, watch, listen to that you recommend that others should check out? That's a long one.  One of the things we do at Star Mountain is we do a monthly lunch and learn.  I try to take different content and bring it to people. A recent person that I think is a phenomenally talented person is Keith Farazzi.  His most recent book was, it's called Never Lead Alone.

33:41
where it talks about this concept of team ship. And it's really all not do it justice by any means, but highly recommend everybody look into it is how do you collaborate as a team? How do you really debate robustly and fast to move things along? Right size people for meetings, the right people in meetings, the right type of meetings, not too many, not too little.  Some of it sounds sort of basic in concepts, but doing it the right way is really.

34:09
I think Keith really brings it to life in a thoughtful, impactful way and has helped coach many incredible businesses  across his career. So that was a recent one that we did that I thought was awesome.  Another one  is  agility.  Leo Tillman, who is the founder of a firm called Agilian, some had credited with  predicting the great financial crisis.

34:37
he has developed this whole model and ecosystem with the late General Chuck Jacobi  that is really around being incredibly organized, incredibly transparent,  so that everything is very tactical. If you think about that from like a military perspective and imagine you kind of, you land on the beach,  everything's different. You learn things new. People are here, people aren't there, whatever it is.

35:04
Everybody's got to know their role to know how to work as a team and execute from a military perspective. And it's sort of like that, got three young kids and what you don't want is a soccer ball. Everybody run and chase the ball one place, then another place, right? You want to people to work as a team to maybe give a different analogy. And I think that Agility, this book that Leo wrote is a fantastic book around content around being hyper organized, talks about commander's intent.

35:33
but how you get everybody the way I think of it, synced up at a senior level, and how do you make sure that information flows down through the entire organization so we're all thinking independently, but with a common language and a common framework? So how do we robustly debate things? How do we make sure that a culture of challenging each other in a respectful way is encouraged, and that shows that you care versus

36:02
just being really polite and nice saying nothing, maybe is that you don't care, because you're not helping people be the best you can be. Those are actually common themes between both  Keith Frazzi's content and Leo Tillman. So those are a couple recent ones that we did.  I think one last thing I would say is I sat on the global board of Harvard's alumni entrepreneurs for a long time. I'm a special advisor to the CEO there.

36:28
a fabulous  lady and organization and you Harvard's got a lot of great content as you do  all the schools out there.  But the Harvard Business Reviews are some nice quick hits. You know, there's good piece of information that I sometimes go back to and I'm like, you know, I read this or listened to this five years ago, but the world's different today. My challenges are different today. And so sometimes the reinforcements.

36:54
are positive around it. So those are three different, what I'll call pieces of content and leaders and experts of some things. Actually the last one  I'll say is Rob Kaplan,  who's the former professor at Harvard Business School, is back now at Goldman Sachs. Right, a long career, incredibly talented individual, is the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs. He has a lot of great books and content as well.  A lot of it's free that talks about

37:22
You know, leadership, understanding yourself, how do you operate? One of my favorite things with Rob when we did our lunch and learn with him for our team is, and this is how I often feel, rarely should you be sending some people some big long email. Instead, it's get the right people together, debate it, talk about it, bang through it, iterate and go. And if you think about something, imagine, you know, Alex, you have a concept, you email me, I ought to read it, think about it, you know, you back.

37:50
questions, get back to something else, reply back to me again, I got to get my mind back into that mindset, thinking about it and iterate. And I'm constantly in a state of being distracted instead of having deep think instead of saying, all right, Alex, let's get together. Let's debate and iterate. So what I tell our team is let's come to meetings ready, think about the questions, debate them in advance, come up with the content and then let's get after it. Let's debate, let's ask questions on the fly. Let's iterate, let's hear each other's.

38:18
ideas, concerns, so forth, creative ideas. And I think Kaplan is really strong at that and what he can accomplish. So he's got a lot of great information,  which I think dovetails,  lastly, into somebody that's been very informative from a content perspective to me, which is Ray Dalio.  Perhaps it's living in Greenwich and it's just in the water a little bit from  the Bridgewater things flowing its way through. you  know, Ray provides so much

38:48
Content and what it is and principles and how to operate heavy focus how to evaluate talent and think about people that I think is Incredibly valuable and we've actually created a proprietary risk scoring which I credit a lot of the thinking to some of the ideas that you know We're inspired by some of the things that Ray talks about Principles and just other content in general just very data driven Person one quick hit to take away because I always love those from people is you know getting two or three

39:18
deep, deep experts to see if you can align in thinking and everything. So if you're like, well, should I do X or Y? Well, who are the three most credible people that you can find and let's see what their decisions are and are those decisions aligned, right? Are they outlier data points or are they trend lines? And you'd find those deep thinkers and get those three thinkers to say, hey, that's an aligned opinion. You know, that's a good chance that has a strong probability of success.

39:45
Whereas you find there's diverging ideas, maybe you got to dive in deeper into it. And so I love the data-driven thinking, the iterating on content and information and how to really  evaluate people and how to operate. We don't go quite as deep as he does with his radical transparency, but I'd say we  take a  page out of his book on that. It's just  phenomenal information  provided for people for free in many cases.

40:15
I said, Christ, that's probably, well, I don't think it's probably, that's the best answer I think I've ever had to that question. I've just been literally anybody watching this will see me just scrolling down pages of notes. They have to tell me to be quiet. I love learning. love data. why this- Hey, that makes two of us. Behind my camera, there's there's Ray Dalio's book. There's absolute tons of  scripture that I've got  that I'm kind of getting through. The hardest part is making the decision of what you need to read right now that will move the needle forward and-

40:43
Um, yeah, Ray, Ray Daly has a big principle is actually, I've got a book coming out very soon and I've actually stolen his front cover as a kind of inspiration of, uh, of how I want to lay it out. So I just think, yeah, I'm big, fan of, uh, of Ray and what he, what he puts out and is, is making things, you know, for people like me, simple and just understanding what's going through. So by now understand why you think, uh, uh, there's a big recession coming. Cause, uh, I think every, every week Ray puts anything out. So yeah.

41:13
This will come and it will happen and  with everything that's been with regards to stimulus. think to them kind of people to listen to is Buffett as well. Observe how he's thinking, what he's doing as well. You know, I think there's some good insights from some traditional value oriented type of thinking people and maybe we will all be wrong.  I'd certainly been wrong for a long time on this, but it feels like  that tail risk.

41:41
probability continues to increase and  there are some things that are in uncharted territories that we are in globally  that I think  to me makes me keep a cash flow oriented mindset and a value oriented mindset and in how we approach things.  If anybody wishes to reach out to you, Brett, post this podcast. How best do they get in touch, please?

42:09
Our Star Mountain Capital page on LinkedIn has a lot of great content as well as our YouTube page are probably the two best ways. And other than that,  if anything that we can be helpful to anybody with, please send an email to info at starmountaincapital.com. We will try to be as helpful as possible. Please send us bullets if you don't mind, speaking bullets not paragraphs so that we can  have somebody quickly screen and get back to you and try to be helpful to you  in any way that.

42:38
potentially can. So thank you, Alex, and appreciate that. Well, thank you for coming onto the podcast. I've absolutely thoroughly enjoyed this. feel like I've had a lesson in leadership, lesson in business, lesson in investing, all sorts of different things. I think there's a lot to digest and consider on this, I've thoroughly enjoyed it. So thank you very much for spending your time, Brett. Thank you, Alex. Appreciate it. Congrats on everything you guys have built as well. Thank you for that. And for all our listeners, yet again, another Private Equity podcast.

43:08
If you haven't already done so, please do subscribe. But till the next time, keep smashing it and thank you very much for listening.