Joost is the Managing Partner at lower middle market private equity firm Seven United Group.  He has over 30 years of experience in mergers & acquisitions and private company investing. Prior to founding SevenUnited Group, Joost was a partner and member of the investment committee at CI Capital Partners, where he focused on working with family and entrepreneur-owned companies to execute buy-and-build strategies.
Joost helped position companies for organic and inorganic growth by developing high-caliber management teams, strengthening back office systems and processes, and making investments in technology to enhance or transform business models. He has helped management teams complete over one hundred add-on acquisitions.  Some of his most successful platform investments include SavATree (sold ot Apax Partners), Hero Digital (sold to AEA Investors) and Summit (sold to Blackrock).   Joost holds a MSc. in Business Economics from Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In this talk, we’ll focus on private equity strategies across the deal cycle as well as deep dive into specific challenges his companies faced and what tactics they undertook to become successful.  

Ted is a highly respected operator, advisor and private equity investor in the lower middle market. He has built incredible value in both the office products and field-based services sectors.  He’s also one of those rare entrepreneurs who swings for the fences but also operates with a low ego,”it’s not about me” people centered approach.  While Ted has led impressive organic growth operating plans, his true specialty is executing on private equity-backed buy-and-build platforms in the lower middle market. Early in his career, Ted bought into a $20M office products company in Seattle.  He and his friend built it to $50M and sold it to a national office products company Corporate Express. He helped grow that company from $100M to $3B over six years. Ted played a key role in driving the M&A strategy. This same company bought a control position in an Australia-based company, which ended up being a turn around opportunity that Ted stepped into. He oversaw a valuation increase of 20X and helped formulate one of the most advanced e-commerce strategies in the industry, driving 80% of their revenues from the web in 2001. In 2002, Ted was recruited by JPMP and Leonard Green to run White Castle, a $300M distributor of building specialty products.  He helped execute a successful sale to Home Depot.  At that time, Ted moved to the investor side, joining middle market private equity firm Leonard Green. His draw was more to the lower middle market, which led him to joining private equity firm KRG, an early investor in White Castle.  Through KRG, Ted joined the board of Convergint Technologies and has been an active board member through two rounds of ownership (KRG to Ares), a rare achievement and indicator of his impact on the success of the business.  Convergint’s revenues grew 20X in the ten years, while maintaining a truly best-in-class company culture, the key catalyst to their ability to grow through acquisitions. Since 2016, Ted has worked mainly as a board member to PE-owned platforms.  He manages to inspire growth while simultaneously working with management to de-risk aggressive business plans.  

Jason Randall grew up in southern California and has lived in Santa Barbara since arriving at UCSB in 1990 for undergrad. After college, Jason spent about 25 years in software product design and engineering, both as a practitioner and executive, at SupplySolution, Citrix and Appfolio. In 2014, he took on a GM leadership role at Appfolio and three years later in 2017 was appointed CEO of Appfolio. Under Jason’s leadership, company revenues have tripled and market cap has increased approximately 2.6X. Success with employee experience has been a key driver; Appfolio has been listed as a Glassdoor Best Places to Work and as Fortune’s #1 Fastest Growing Company. He has been named to the Glassdoor Top CEOs list twice. In this talk, we’ll cover big picture perspectives that have helped Jason be successful as well as specific learning experiences and day-to-day- practices that we can learn from.

Tooey is the founder, ceo and chairman of Procore. He started the company in 2002, focused on finding a way to connect everyone in the construction industry on a software platform to drive efficiencies. Procore is now the #1 construction platform in the world, connecting over 1.8 million users across 125+ countries.

Today Procore trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker PCOR. During his student years, Tooey worked in a cabinet shop and on several construction sites. This all took place in the Bay Area during the 1990s and Tooey soon found himself immersed in the tech boom. He started a company Webpage, a software company that helped companies better serve their customers through self-service intranets. Several years later, Tooey was building his own home and couldn’t stop thinking about the lack of software tools used in the building sector. So Tooey started Procore.

The company didn’t take off right away but once smart phones and high speed wifi proliferated, it allowed the value of their cloud solutions to really unleash. Procore has fulfilled Tooey’s mission of bringing amazing efficiencies to the industry by connecting owners, general contractors, specialty contractors, architects, and engineers in one place.

Lee is one of the greatest wrestlers in United States history. He was a three-time Gold Medalist in the World Championships, a four-time Gold Medalist in the World Cup of Wrestling, a two-time Gold Medalist in the Pan American Games, a seven-time national champion, and was named the United States Wrestling Federation “Man of the Year” in 1978. He was inducted to the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in 1989.

Lee has lived an extraordinary life due to his accomplishments but moreso the obstacles he had to overcome to become a champion and later to surmount unexpected life challenges that would have buried the most resilient of us. His story is incredibly inspiring. Yes, it’s about passion but it’s mostly about the power of response and being the ultimate survivor. It’s also of story about the power and beauty that comes from just being a good natured, mentally fit individual.

In this talk, Lee will share his life story and impart lessons that are essential to private equity investors and private equity-backed executives. Resilience, focusing on results, dealing with adversity, understanding what it takes to become a champion in your profession — these are a few of the topics that Lee will discuss with us.

28 years after the 1980 Boycott where Lee was a favorite to win the Gold he got a chance to fulfill Olympic dreams by being selected to coach the 2008 Olympic Wrestling Team. He has been featured three times in Sports Illustrated Magazine (February 1977, April 1982, May 1982). Life Magazine featured Kemp in their “1984 Olympic Preview” issue along with Michael Jordan, Carl Lewis, Edwin Moses and Greg Louganis.

Lee Kemp was born and spent his early youth in Cleveland, Ohio and later moved to Chardon, a farming community 30 miles northeast of Cleveland, where he was a 2-time Ohio state champion finishing his junior and senior years. Kemp attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison, winning three NCAA titles. After his freshman year Lee Kemp didn’t lose another collegiate bout posting 108 victories, including a win over the legendary Dan Gable.

Lee has held marketing management roles for several Fortune 500 companies,. He has owned and successfully operated a Ford automobile dealership for 14 years and is an accomplished keynote motivational speaker including working as a “color commentator” for ESPN and the Big Ten Network. Lee Kemp continues to follow his love for wrestling by coaching and mentoring wrestlers of all ages and skill levels at camps, clinics and competitions locally, nationally and internationally. [Visit LeeKemp.com for additional information on Lee and the organizations he supports.]

Jon is Head of the Global Portfolio Operations Group at Elliott Management Corp, where he works with management and boards of companies in which Elliott funds are an influential investor.Founded in 1977, Elliott manages approximately $41 billion in assets.

Prior to joining Elliott, Jon headed teams responsible for operational oversight, governance and value enhancement of portfolio companies at several firms, including Blue Mountain Capital, Anchorage Capital and Goldman Sachs. In those capacities, he acted as board chair or member, senior executive, or board-level advisor for dozens of companies in a broad range of industries over 18 years. Roles included President of Icahn Enterprises, L.P. (NYSE-IEP), CEO of Philip Services Corporation and Viskase Companies, and board member of American Railcar Industries, Crescent Communities, Martinrea Honsel, National Energy Group, PLH Group, Promises Behavioral Health, WestPoint International, WIND Hellas, Xenith Bankshares and XO Communications.

Jon is a Life Member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He earned a J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School, and BS and MBA, magna cum laude from Babson College.

·         Rich culture and highly effective culture ops drives best-in-class product and customer loyalty.  Patrick finds this is the best corporate lever for Sonos and an area he spends the most time on.  He believes you have to focus on employee experience to get customer experience right. 

·         Over communicate your values.  This was a tidbit Satya Nadella offered Patrick a few years ago. As a leader, your job is to communicate, communicate, over communicate (reinforce, whatever you want to call it) the values that you see as essential for the organization to succeed.

·         Pivoting is about opportunity not risk.  When Patrick advocated for Blackberry’s push into messaging software (market WhatsApp ultimately claimed) or Sonos’s prioritization of partnerships, it wasn’t about taking risks -- it was about what path will generate the most profits for the company.  Yes, bold pivots have execution risk given lack of maturity in the market; but, the mindset for pivot is opportunism and pragmatism not risk taking.

·         Value of international experience.  Early in his career, Patrick drove Blackberry’s international expansion, starting in China and leading them into 167 countries ultimately.  Conventional wisdom speaks to the cultural empathy dividends of global experience. That’s true of course, but, an undervalued aspect to global experience is learning how to accomplish objectives in an uncertain, foreign environment. 

Kevin O’Connor has over 30 years of experience in high tech, both as an entrepreneur and investor. Kevin was the founder, CEO, and chairman of internet advertisement-technology giant, DoubleClick, which was acquired by Google in 2007 for $3.1 billion.

Kevin is currently the CEO of Graphiq (acquired by Amazon in 2017), a technology company whose mission is to drastically simplify the process of accessing the world's knowledge. Graphiq turns complicated data into vivid and contextually-rich visualizations and knowledge products. 

Kevin also runs O’Connor Ventures, from which he has invested in companies such as Internet Security Systems, Procore, 1-800-Flowers.com, HotJobs, and MeetUp.

Kevin grew up in Michigan.  He attended the University of Michigan, where he obtained a Bachelors of Science degree in electrical engineering. 

1.      First order of business at every company is establishing the “why not us” mentality with the team.  In all of his companies as well as tenure as wrestling coach, Kevin has consciously sought to achieve this objective so that his employees knew they would be at the vanguard and they were the only ones standing in their way.  Why shouldn’t we be the best?

2.      Five Gotta Do’s.  Kevin believes an important part of his job description as CEO is constantly defining the five most important objectives of the company; and ensuring the team operates and prioritizes in alignment with the five gotta do’s.  

3.      Hire “smart, happy athletes.”  In assessing “smart,” Kevin doesn’t assign a lot of value to where someone went to college.  He’s happy to hire someone from Washington University in St. Louis over Stanford.  Regarding “athlete,” O’Connor looks for people with high winning expectations from themselves.  And lastly, life is too short to hire unhappy people. 

Daniel’s diverse, collective work experiences have helped him build a career as one of the most effective PE-backed CEOs and operators around. 

Daniel grew up in Wisconsin, and after watching Charlie and the Chocolate Factory at a young age, decided he wanted to get into business.  After high school, Daniel made his way to Stanford, where he majored in quantitative economics and graduated with distinction.  After some work experience, he earned his MBA from Harvard Business School, and from there joined Bain for a ten-year stint.  While at Bain, Dan gained valuable foundation experience, working around the globe in a number of industries and functions/domains. 

At the time of becoming partner at Bain, Dan deliberately pivoted to the operator side.  He joined Roll International (Teleflora, Pom Wonderful), where he ran their operations improvement and acquisitions group and later became the CFO for the $300M Teleflora holding.

In 2002 after three years at Teleflora, Dan partnered up with PE firm Swander Pace Capital to acquire and run Fleischmann’s Vinegar, which at the time had 50% market share in the U.S. for vinegar.  After five years, he and his partners sold the company for a 3X return.  With 75% of their COGS being corn supply, navigating the ethanol craze required agility, innovative strategy and focused execution.  Through effective management relations and data analytics, Dan and his team were also able to significantly increase alcohol yield, one of the most important operating metrics in that business.

Around that time, Dan partnered again with Swander Pace to serve as CEO of International Fiber Corporation, a $100M revenue producer of powdered cellulose and insoluble fiber products for the food and industrial applications markets.  One of the key ways they added value to this holding was launching sales teams into new markets.    

Today, Dan serves as chairman of Encore Consumer Capital-backed Van Law Foods (private label and contract manufacturer of salad dressings and sauces) and as an operator partner and board member of Altamont Capital-owned Excel Fitness Holdings (fitness club operator).

As an experienced operator often working with private equity sponsors, Dan has deep experience handling the multi-faceted strategic and operational challenges that come to companies in crisis from fast-changing industry dynamics.  He has extensive experience in senior and mezzanine debt financing and in transactions to buy and sell privately owned companies.

1.  It’s Who You Work With.  It’s important not to underestimate the efficiency and quality of life factor of working with people you trust and that get you.  Throughout Dan’s career, he has had the benefit of working with people that “get him” and vice versa.  And he has deliberately chosen to work with people where that factor exists. Business is so much more efficient and enjoyable when you match up with partners who you have natural chemistry and trust with.  If you have the opportunity to work with partners with this level of effortlessness on the interpersonal front, take it, even if it’s not the richest option.

2. Recognizing Situations Requiring Bold Action.  When you’re in a situation that requires bold leadership, make bold moves.  It takes intuition to recognize the scenario and guts to act.  When Dan was the CEO of Fleischmans, 70% of his COGS was sugar and then the ethanol craze occurred driving up the cost of sugar.  The conventional wisdom was that you can’t go around ADM for supply.  Dan recognized it as an existential moment for his company that required bold action.  Dan went out and negotiated direct with a supplier in Brazil.  They imported a tanker of ethanol and stored the supply in a terminal in Houston.  This saved his company.

3. Being Forthright and Communicating Fast with Investors.  Swander Pace and Altamont Capital chose to partner with Dan on multiple transactions.  Dan executed enterprise value growth, but it was his ability to communicate fast in a forthright manner with institutional investors that led to such a high trust factor.  During one crisis (plant fire), Dan immediately scheduled an all-hands-on-deck board meeting o

Annie has leveraged her expertise in the science of smart decision making to excel at pursuits as varied as championship poker to public speaking. For two decades, Annie was one of the top poker players in the world. In 2004, she bested a field of 234 players to win her first World Series of Poker (WSOP) bracelet. The same year, she triumphed in the $2 million winner-take-all, invitation-only WSOP Tournament of Champions. In 2010, she won the prestigious NBC National Heads-Up Poker Championship. Prior to becoming a professional poker player, Annie was awarded the National Science Foundation Fellowship. Because of this fellowship, she studied Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. While Annie’s career began in 1987, it has further developed into 2017.

• Creating a culture where employees truly feel comfortable taking risks requires a systemic normalization of dissent. Leading companies say they want employees to take risks and are prepared to positively reinforce failure after smart risks were taken.  The issue is that this approach by itself will limit the potential of the occurrences of risk/failure for the greater growth projection of the business. If a company does more week-to-week, back-end work (whether leadership chats, role playing) demonstrating that dissent is a mainstream part of the company, then that will lead to more risks being taken overall.
• Create opportunities to get feedback on a real-life decision but make sure the feedback is objective. The tendency is to want to describe a challenging situation, share the outcome and then ask for feedback about whether the decision was the right one or not. Annie calls this “infection bias”. If we truly want to learn about different approaches to decision making, describe the challenge, provide the data and thought process leading up to making the decision and ask for feedback before you share the outcome.
• When interviewing candidates for a job, it’s useful to ask questions that are extremely tough and vague by design. This creates an uncertain environment and will help identify those that show grace under pressure versus those that feel cornered and react in a way that shows discomfort with uncertainty.

Rick and has been a software entrepreneur and CEO most of his professional life.  He co-founded Mindbody (Nasdaq: “MB”) in 2000 and has grown the company from a garage concept to a publicly-traded company.  MindBody, which is a leading SAAS company serving the wellness and spa sector, started off as a desktop software company in the early 2000’s and bravely migrated to a SAAS delivery in 2006 as a very early adopter of this deployment model.  Salesforce.com, which was and remains at the vanguard of SAAS through secure cloud hosting, was not widely accepted during that period by industry as a secure and efficient platform for service delivery.  It was a bold move, which paid off richly to MindBody’s employees and investors.   

Rick grew up in southern California and then moved back east to attend the Naval Academy for college.  He graduated in 1987 and for the following six years worked as a submarine officer for the US Navy.  From 1994 to 2000, Rick embarked on his career and in his words things did not take off until, to put it simply, he changed his mindset.  A client of his recommended he read Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits book, and in Rick’s words, it changed the way he looked at the world and indirectly paved the way for his future success as an entrepreneur and business leader.

We appreciate Rick trekking down to Santa Barbara from San Luis Obispo for this talk. It should be a great event! 

Interesting turning point ten years into his career.  Rick was 34 when he saw the Stephen Covey DVD at Starbucks and decided to pop it in during his drive through Topanga Canyon in west LA.  The wisdom of the “power of response” mindset hit him like a ton of bricks and his whole world changed from that point forward. Rick also related this concept to the Travis Kalanick video crisis with an observations this might have been a scenario where he didn’t need to get caught up in the noise – where the big picture was a passionate stakeholder with a big heart for the Uber business and wanting it to thrive.

Staying close to customers is the oxygen of his company.   Rick shared that, plain and simple, it is what keeps his company alive.   He feels centered only when he is close with his customers.  Fact: his company thrives or suffers proportionately to how close they stay to their customers. 

In international markets, don’t forget that marketing to early adopters is different than marketing to mainstream business users.  Rick made the point that early adopters in global markets are always the innovators and relate more to existing features requiring less localization.  It is folly to conclude that because these influential innovators embrace existing product that major localization efforts are not required for further market penetration.

Not a single regret when his team decided to stay narrow versus go wider.  At one time, they won a bid from one of the largest prospects in the industry after a 9 month competitive process.  The company demanded a statement of work that would require constant customization of the software platform.  Rick turned down a deal that would have increased their revenues by more than 30%.  The deal ultimately brought major havoc on a competitor that took on the business.