ACP finds it’s a good time to for exits; 40 under 40 features Adenia’s Martha Osier

Happy Friday, Hubsters. MK Flynn here with the Wire.

While painful for my retirement funds, yesterday’s public market plunge reminds me once again of the resilience of private equity as an asset class. As Bain Capital Credit’s Michael Ewald told me earlier in the week, the mid-market companies most PE firms invest in “tend to be nimbler and have a business model that is niche enough that it won’t ebb and flow just with its industry or the broader economy.”

Exit strategy. One of the mid-market deals announced this week that caught my attention was Align Capital Partners’ sale of Protegis Fire & Safety to Summit Fire & Security, a subsidiary of SFP Holding, owned by BlackRock Long Term Private Capital. The deal marks the fifth exit within a year for the ACP, which manages $775 million in committed capital with investment teams in Cleveland and Dallas.

To find out more about ACP’s exit strategy, in particular, and the current environment for exits, in general, I reached out to Chris Jones, co-founder and managing partner. Here are some insights:

Why is this a good time for exits?
“Our pace of exits has increased partially as a function of the firm’s inception date,” Jones said. “Align Capital Partners was founded in 2016 and, as such, we were solely focused on deploying capital and scaling early platform investments for the first 4-5 years. Since its founding, ACP has invested in 14 platforms and closed 53 add-ons. Now that we’ve been operating for over five years, we’re hitting a natural inflection point where we’ll expect to realize a few investments each year. That said, our exits have largely been driven by our portfolio companies generally achieving their growth targets and scaling into much bigger and better businesses – positioning them well for an ownership transition. Further, we believe the exit environment has remained healthy with robust appetite for high-quality companies of scale that are viewed as a good platform starting point for larger PE funds or sizable add-ons for strategic buyers.”

What can you share about returns?
“While we can’t disclose specific returns, we are pleased with the overall results from our first five exits and proud of how our partnership model has supported our management teams and their aggressive growth goals,” Jones explains. “Several of our recent exits were of platforms whereby we helped the companies scale to three or four times the size of our initial platform investment, including Protegis, which more than tripled in size during our partnership period.”

For more, read the whole story.

Rising stars. Thirteen dealmakers are among the PE professionals recognized in Private Equity International’s 40 under 40: Future Leaders of Private Equity, class of 2022. Published earlier this week, the annual list celebrates emerging talent in the asset class, highlighting individuals set to play a leading role in the market in the years ahead.
Among the dealmakers featured is Martha Osier, 39, partner, Adenia Partners:

“Nairobi-based Osier established Adenia Partners’ East African office in 2018 and subsequently sourced and executed two retail investments in the region – Kenyan supermarkets Quick Mart and Tumaini. She is credited with orchestrating the merger between the two firms and guiding the combined group’s growth. Praised as a ‘highly analytical and astute dealmaker,’ Osier is adept at scaling companies in the region’s consumer and healthcare sectors. Recent deals include the acquisition of East African life sciences equipment distributor Africa Biosystems, and the acquisition of Altilands, the parent company of Kenyan fresh-cut roses grower Red Lands Roses. Osier sits on the board of directors of four of Adenia’s portfolio companies. She also mentors high-achieving school students applying for competitive universities in the US.”

Read about all the dealmakers honored here. And read the full coverage here.

Off-duty. Buyouts’ Off-duty column provides a snapshot of top investors, including a few details about what they do when not chasing deals. In the latest one, Kirk Falconer talks to John Maldonado, an Advent International managing partner. As co-head of healthcare investing in North America, he has been instrumental in many of the firm’s top deals, among them Genoa Healthcare, a services provider to behavioral health communities. Genoa, sold in 2018 to UnitedHealth for a reported $2.5 billion, marked an opportunity to “do well by doing good,” Maldonado told Buyouts. An Advent veteran of more than 16 years, and a member of its executive committee, Maldonado has also played a key role in investments like AccentCare and RxBenefits.

Here are a few snippets from Kirk’s story:

Professionally, what was your toughest moment?

Navigating through the second quarter of 2020. The emotional devastation of George Floyd’s murder only exacerbated the fear, disconnectedness and solitude our team was feeling due to covid.

What was your most rewarding moment?
Helping to build Genoa Healthcare, the largest provider of pharmacy and medication management services for individuals with behavioral health and other complex, chronic health conditions.

What advice would you give a young person interested in a PE career?
There is no work-life balance, only work-life trade-offs, and generally speaking, the private equity space will force you to make them. Just be smart about it. And don’t forget to call your mother.

Read the full story here.

That feels like a good note to end on. Next week, I’ll be writing the Wire from PEI Media’s office in London! We’re expanding PE Hub’s editorial team in Europe. More details on that to come!

Happy Mother’s Day everyone!

MK