-: My name is Kristin Johnson,
I'm a Managing Director at Altamont Capital.
Altamont Capital is a Bay Area-based private equity firm,
we are managing our third fund
which is about a billion dollars.
We invest in mostly non-technology companies
which is a little bit unusual for the Bay Area
but ranging from consumer companies in the food sector
to restaurants, some industrial businesses,
healthcare, financial services,
so it's a broad range of companies.
Yeah, I'm one of seven partners there
and I head up two functions at the firm,
one is called new deal origination
so I'm out in the market looking for new businesses to buy
so I meet with a lot of business owners and operators
who are looking for an ownership transition
and I meet with a lot of bankers
who are advising those companies for what they should do.
And then secondly I help finance our companies
so we put in some equity, like when you buy a house,
you put up some cash up front
then you borrow some money from a bank
and so we borrow some money to buy our companies as well
and I help figure out where we should buy that capital...
Borrow that capital from and what that should look like.
So we're looking for businesses, as I said,
that are, you know, going through some sort of transition,
usually those are businesses that have been under-managed
but they're not necessarily bad businesses,
so I'll give you an example,
we bought a business that makes
dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets,
you'll see them in the freezer at many grocery stores
and it had been owned by folks
that hadn't really invested in it,
it was a good cash flow business, so it was well run,
but they had not invested to grow the plant
or to find additional sources of production,
they weren't really investing in marketing
or new product development at all,
but what we saw was a great brand
that was well loved by the consumers
and the retailers, and so we bought the business,
we're investing in new production,
we're investing in marketing, we're doing R and D
to see what brand extensions we can make.
We've added folks to the management team to do that
and it's now growing
and hopefully will be worth well more than what we paid.
And so we'll interview different investment bankers
who help us give us judgment on what they think
the company would be worth,
who the potential buyers would be,
and how to run a process, so with some companies,
there are only really a few logical
potential strategic buyers, let's say,
other companies in the industry
that you would wanna call
and you could run a pretty narrow process.
Other companies will have a much bigger
universe of potential buyers
and you would wanna run a broad process
to see if you could find the highest bid off that
so we try to balance those things
and understand what the market will bear
but we're really trying to generate a return
for our investors that's attractive.