00:00:00 · Mikk, James Bohannon
[00:00:00] S0: My guest today is James Bohannon, principal at the New York City based multifamily office and merchant bank, Belzberg. James, it was great to meet you in Dallas last week, and thank you for coming to the podcast. Excited for this. [00:00:15] S1: Thank you, Mikk. Great to meet you in person. Always fun to be at the Wellspring of private equity that is Maguire Woods. [00:00:23] S0: Okay. So I've done now almost 190 episodes, and I believe you are the very first family office investor on the podcast. And that being said, I'd be curious to know how did your own journey led you into the world of family offices?
00:00:40 · James Bohannon
[00:00:40] S1: Yeah, great question. Happy to give my background and tell you about Belzberg, etc. I kind of came in an interesting round of the family office world. A lot of times it's pretty straightforward sort of banking consulting, PE fund, family office. And I I actually came more of an entrepreneurial route. So I started an equity research. I then started a... In New York. I then started a shoe business, which I started in in high school, believe it or not, and that started doing pretty well. So I left my finance job, built that up, and then we sold it to a family office. And that was in like two thousand and fourteen, fifteen. So I was like four or five years out of school. I'd never even heard of a family office. It was just like a rich guy, which used to be what a family office was. And then learning about sort of this whole ecosystem was super interesting. And then a bunch of other kind of stops along the way to get to Belzberg, but kind of all different parts of the private equity private markets ecosystem where the family office capital is is such a huge sort of integral part. So learning about this channel has been super interesting. And so when Strauss Zelnick, who is the founder of Belzberg and Co. Was setting up Belzberg in two thousand eighteen, nineteen, and beyond that, I started having conversations with him. He's a longtime friend and mentor of mine, and I was deeply, you know, interested in helping him out and and and sort of joining full time, which I did. I can give a little history on Belzberg if that's if that's Yeah. Happy, which is, where I sit today. I run sort of the sourcing and origination for Belzberg and Co. We are... We call ourselves a family backed merchant bank or a multifamily office merchant bank. We started as a single family office, and this will probably be some interesting nuance as we explore the world. But the Belzberg family was a Canadian family. Sam Belzberg was the namesake, and he was a private equity investor, real estate investor who built a highly liquid asset pool. He passed in 2018 and he asked his son-in-law, very sort of similar playbook, to look after the asset pool on behalf of the family. That asset pool was an airport. It was land tracks in Calgary. It was oil and gas deals, LP interests. It was deals written on napkins with snake oil salesman in Texas. It was a little bit of everything.
00:03:07 · James Bohannon
And, he just knew that if he handed over that asset pool to a bank, they would have basically liquidated it for pennies on dollar. So he asked his son-in-law, said, look. Preserve these assets. Carry on this business. And he also started a bunch of businesses. He was an incredible entrepreneur. And his son-in-law is Strauss Zelnick, happens to be an incredible investor and operator and visionary in his own right. And Strauss, who's a a, you know, pretty well known sort of public CEO, has been CEO of Take Two Interactive, a video game company for the last seventeen plus years. And he built his career in media and in investing and building businesses and has been a mentor to so many people throughout sort of the industry, myself included. So Sam was very lucky that that son-in-law happened to be an incredible, you know, like incredibly effective and competent family member. And the idea there was to merge the asset pool. So Strauss had his own stuff. His wife's family had had their stuff. And it was like, how do we create, you know, an entity that manages two very different asset pools with the same vision and in a way where sort of everyone gets along. So we, out of the were really a single family office where everyone was connected through marriage. And there was another leg of the family as well there, which is a well known Canadian name. And so out of the gate in 2018, it was really two to three families all connected through marriage, and we were working through the single family office exemption. And it was really about untangling the asset pool, figuring out what's where, what's valued where, is there a team managing this, what's worth this, a lot of the blocking and tackling and, you know, skeletons and closets, etcetera. But one of the things that Sam had said to Strauss was don't just, like, don't just preserve the asset pool, build things. I built you this great legacy and this great platform. He had built a real estate private equity firm in Vancouver. And so the idea was to really expand that platform. And so we've done a few different things. We've built a structured capital business called Everbird Capital off the platform. We have built a multifamily office where we help other families, mostly sort of friends of the family and sort of relatives.
00:05:29 · James Bohannon, Mikk
And so we've built kind of this interesting diversified family office merchant bank sort of the only way to describe it. [00:05:37] S0: And now when it comes to yeah, good, good. Thanks for the overview. And what about now when it comes to the investments you're able to make when it comes to the flexibility in this independent sponsor deal by deal lower middle market, considering your background, how flexible you are when it comes to ticket size, holding periods, because we see a lot of those different models. Is it someone is just buying one great company, someone's going deal by deal building a platform, serial acquirers, holdcos, so your flexibility when it comes to packing those individuals, groups?
00:06:15 · James Bohannon, Mikk
[00:06:15] S1: Yeah, I mean, flexibility is sort of the hallmark of family capital. I mean, why do people like family office partners? Because it's flexible, meaning it just belongs to someone. It's not spoken for. It's not coming from another sort of fund where it has to be kind of deployed or called or at certain pace and then redeemed at a certain pace based on some fund structure. And so family capital is ultimately flexible, which means every family office is gonna invest differently. They're gonna invest based on their own parameters and desires. They're gonna be based on how their team is compensated and the alignment and the incentives of the team, is something we should really talk about, just very important in family offices, which people sort of overlook. It's gonna be invested based on the proclivities and desires of the principal, right? Some billionaires love venture, some hate venture, right? Some want to do sports teams, some people want to do huge direct investments, some people want to do funds. The rhyme or the reason of that is really preference and, circle of competence and where that family office is in their journey. If you look at the industry of family offices, you're in Europe, are you not? [00:07:37] S0: Europe. Yep. So Correct.
00:07:38 · James Bohannon
[00:07:38] S1: In Europe, the family office has been, you know, it's a family enterprise. It goes way, way back to the original sort of merchant banks of the early years. Some family offices in Europe can be 500, you know, a thousand years old, etcetera. In The US, they're all pretty new. So it's a new thing. So if you talk to some of the European counterparts, they're gonna be like, we made all the mistakes until we figured out sort of what worked for us. And it seems to me they all kind of after like fifty, one hundred years kind of go back to just the very large endowment style investing where they're using sort of a massive consultant. But in the early years, a lot of families sort of make their own, they have to make their own mistakes or figure out what works for them or figure out what they kind of want to do. And so that's kind of the flexibility. Some come out of the gate and they invest in 25 different funds. And then they're like, all my liquidity is locked up and now I have 25 line items and I can't invest this new sort of great thing that comes out. Some people will do direct investments right off the gate and they'll risk it's a lot harder and they're not equipped to do it. Some people will do a bunch of venture deals and get their faces ripped off. You have to figure out what works for you and what works for us. Like our preference is sort of cash flowing, easy to understand businesses in The US old economy. That's obviously a very popular place, but that's consumer services, business services, shipping logistics, little bit of healthcare, things like that, multi site consumer. We like franchising businesses. We like businesses that are easy to understand. We like really strong alignment with sponsor management team and investors, etcetera. And there's a bunch of attributes in our deal box that we specifically look for things like skin in the game and experience and all that. But in terms of the flexibility, it's sort of all over the place. The fun part too, is if something super interesting comes along, and we're like, look, we want to make a small investment in this, it's not necessarily part of our core mandate. We can do it if we have our own process on how to do that. As every sort of family officer, multifamily office does, we have a discussion, we have sort of an IC process, we put together a document, we do references, etcetera.