Mirja Lehmler-Brown, Hayfin
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Mirja Lehmler-Brown is the founding managing director of Hayfin Capital Management‘s Private Equity Solutions investment team.
She previously worked with Hayfin founder Tim Flynn (listen to his Fund Shack podcast here) at Goldman Sachs, before moving into PE fund investment with Aberdeen Asset Management and Scottish Widows.
Ross Butler (00:00):
You’re listening to Fund Shack. I’m Ross Butler. And today I’m speaking with Mirja Brown, a managing director with Haven capital management. Mirja started out in investment banking with Goldman Sachs and then worked in asset management with Scottish widows and Aberdeen. She joined Hayfin to establish and build its private equity solutions business. We talk about setting up and growing an investment function from the ground up manager selection, direct secondaries, and investment opportunities across Europe. Welcome to fund shack. You joined Hayfin in 2018. I think that’s correct. Tell me, how did you get involved with it
Mirja Lehmler-Brown (00:38):
Started quite a long time ago, Tim Flinn, our CEO, and founder worked at Goldman Sachs.
Ross Butler (00:45):
Who we’ve had on Fund Shack
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (00:46):
Yes, and we work together at leverage finance. In fact, we’re sitting next to each other and I left, Goldman Sachs to move, up to Scotland. My husband is Scottish, but we stayed in touch over the years. And so I, heard the story evolve from him leaving and then coming up with the idea to set up, HayFin. And, you know, we exchange ideas and views and, and shared learnings up in Scotland. I started to invest in private equity with Scottish widows initially. And that experience from an LP perspective was also interesting, you know, to Tim when we started out. So when he sat up, he, had discussions with a few different private equity funds and he asked my views on who they were and what potentially could be a good partner for him early doors. So, that then turned into him growing, uh, or him and his team growing the business.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (01:47):
And in 2070 that institutional investor changed to British Columbia investment management corporation. And he’d grown the business from lending and other different products within the credit space and never, ever kind of, I guess, before considered the equity, opportunity. And that’s where I then spent over 10 years up in Scotland. And, so he asked me if I would want to, what would I do if I would set up a private equity mid-market business for, British Columbia? How would that look? And would I be willing to do that on his platform? So I did that and come up hopefully with a compelling strategy because British Columbia certainly thought it was a good idea. And that’s why I moved over in 2018 to start from scratch with, with no team, no processes, but a fabulous platform and brand in form of Hayfin.
Ross Butler (02:49):
So that sounds like a great opportunity, but, quite an unusual one, because you had a very large institutional background. So you sat next to Tim and you were doing presumably were doing credits at the time, is that correct?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (03:00):
Correct? Yes. So Goldman Sachs, but from Scottish widows. So when I started, there was only private equity, only Europe, predominantly mid-market and across the spectrum from funds investing from co-investing and also secondary investing, which is three of the larger group of investing that you can do in the private equity market as an LP investor.
Ross Butler (03:24):
So why did this kind of more entrepreneurial opportunity of setting something up from scratch appeal to you?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (03:29):
Very good question. I come from the middle of nowhere, in Sweden and I’m actually the first person in my family to go to university. So arrogance and Politics are something that I can say I’m allergic to. And in a large institution, I think when you start out working you’re so focused on delivering a good job that you don’t notice political aspects. I think as you grow older, more experience wiser, you start to figure out that it’s not just about that delivering. It’s not just about the excellent, it’s lots of other things going on as well. And at that point, after 10 years in a consolidating Scottish asset management market, it’s been a number of combinations that we had gone through much larger group and, the firm had become very political and that again is something that’s really frustrating. And I also just in itself, for me, I’m driven by delivering really good investment return based on facts.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown(04:35):
And in that, the energy really needs to go to originate, discuss ideas, pick the best investing. If you need to worry about Politics, how you need to behave or not challenge or challenge. There’s so much energy leakage out of a team or an organization. So that frustrated me and triggered to think, well, if I start from scratch and I can set the culture, I can handpick a team. I can obviously ensure that we have none of that, that we can be a group of individuals with different backgrounds that burn from the same purpose in delivering those returns very often for pensioners, but in a way that then avoid negative aspects such as Politcs.
Ross Butler (05:29):
And so you’re only what three years in that state. I mean, how’s it going from a cultural perspective? Have you been able to, introduce that kind of different culture?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (05:39):
Yes. It’s, it’s um, it’s going really, really well. I mean, you know, back into the entrepreneurial aspect, it can be scary too, when you haven’t done that before. And you can question yourself whether you’re able to, I mean, from sheer experience, point of view, you build so many networks, you build so much pattern recognition that, that clearly you can take with you, but, but you know, where people come and join you as an individual, is scary. But I think the fact that we talk with so passionately about the fact that it’s team-based and that everybody is equal if you will. And we start, we start with the junior people, sharing their ideas fast up into the senior, and there’s lots of frustration. Now, the private equity industry has grown up and many of these organizations have been quite large.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (06:33):
That means lots of mid-level and junior, uh, uh, staff. If you’d be, look, people are frustrated with the same thing I was frustrated with. And if you see the people we were looking for, work Lilly, high-ability ambitious people, but then driven by the same values and principles of team, of responsibility of doing the right thing, are working hard clearly, but fact-based. And then also this continuous improvement mindset were also the senior people want to invest in the junior, learning by doing the type of job. You don’t read some books or become a good investor, but genuinely if you have as a mid-level and junior in a person genuinely feel that the senior person sit there for you, side-by-side they roll their sleeves up and want to transfer that knowledge to you. It’s a wonderful proposition. And hence it took a little while because it was not noon, you know, from a brand perspective on the equity side, but windows discussions, clearly lots of people that didn’t fit in.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (07:42):
But there were a lot of people that were intrigued and were really looking for the same things. So now we’re a team of eight people and again, operating very much under those types of ideas and principles, you know, living, breathing that culture. And hence, that’s the most satisfying we are, did the strategies working and the performance coming through strongly now after three years, which again is interlinked. It helps the culture help the feeling of wanting to come to work. You know, the belonging of being there when it all works. But I think it’s driven very much by the cultural elements of it.
Ross Butler (08:23):
Yeah. Success definitely helps. Did I hear you say tha, junior people speak first?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (08:29):
Yes. Around our, so our investment processes such, institutional three steps, that’s no different, but when we, um, you know, start in the team, so the first lab level, the one-pager, everybody is expected to readapt to a certain degree and we start with the most junior person. They need to share their views fast. And, everyone comes in many have banking background when they come in more of the mid-level, people when they joined, came from private equity, but none had really had that experience before. So when they joined the team meeting and were discussing ideas, they were not prepared. She was say, first time around the fact that they needed to express their views. First, second time around, they were very prepared. And why we’re doing this is it’s the same thing. As many things you can’t tell to children to avoid mistakes, they need to do it themselves in order to properly learn and invest in.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (09:32):
There are so many different aspects in the pattern recognition. You know what you need to think about. And we obviously have strong protocols and processes to help along the way, but it’s really your judgment. Your thinking. If you listen to other people, you don’t really learn what is important. If you need to read about the company in a situation and you come up with your views, a unit of thought it through it’s your views. Um, and very often initially they are not filtered or the weightings are not, you know, where it should be, but it doesn’t matter because, for us, it doesn’t matter. It’s the only way to learn. So we look at a lot of things. We originate a lot of things. It’s part of our model, but we do be very, very disciplined. So we do very little, but the more we look at, the more we discuss, the more we learn and the more they learn in, changing, adjusting the way your thinking to become more balanced in their view and also go away from, is this used to good company and just come to a good company. It doesn’t necessarily become a good investment if you pay too much. So it’s just learning around companies is certainly important management teams and pricing and structure and part of value creation. And, and with that, quite quickly you can see the evolution in their thinking, their alignment with the filter, and how we assess where their, a situation is a good investment or not. And that’s also great to see
Ross Butler (11:03):
Tim said to me about, diversity, but from a very broad perspective, um, which is making sure that you’re not hiring in your own mold and making sure that, everyone, not just from the gender or racial perspective, but also in terms of, uh, the way people think and their economic backgrounds and all of that. But it can be in practical terms, it can just be very easy to, to, to instruct a recruitment agency to say, we want people from Harvard and Oxford and, you know, and suddenly you’re already going down that route. To what degree do you feel you’ve achieved some level of let’s call it intellectual diversity around the table so far.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (11:37):
Yeah. And there are so many layers to it and we are eight people, but we are all different nationalities. And many of us have, not even two, I’m half Swedish, half German, and that’s only part, but, you know, it’s the language, it’s also the culture, the way you have been brought up, which then, the principles and values, because while do want, diversity in thinking for sure, diversity in pattern, you want a different type of pattern that recognition, but you still want the same values. You need to find a group, that, that those principals on why we are here needed to be the same, even if we are value-add from the pattern recognition in analyzing deals
Ross Butler (12:21):
Now in terms of your actual business, maybe could you set up for us, you know, your mandates, what, what you are investing in and where are your sources of funds?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (12:30):
Yes. So we are, continue we’re backed by our Canadian as a British Columbia investment management corporation. And the strategy is the European mid-market. One of the things when I analyzed, uh, you know, setting up in 2018, because it was different when Haven was founded, they were very early into a new growing market that, the market of direct lending, private equities, quite mature. So one of the things that we did, I feel that the, in my view, the private equity industry has created silos very often. There’s a separate, product for primary funds or a second, separate silo bucket for co-investment or a sec, you know, secondaries have a different bucket. And I felt that for us doing mid-market, we don’t want any restraints. We want to be able to originate across the board and just focus on picking the right that the best opportunity is flexible across your mid-market.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (13:30):
The larger funds, larger companies to a degree, you can say, I guess it’s less risk. So it’s a different style of investing and different returns, mid-market, or to generate, a premium return in comparison to the larger market. But if you look in the dig into the track record, people have all failed in doing that. And it’s been too much volatility. So when we set up, but we want to do, if we have one bucket allows us to, one year, maybe they’ll be more opportunities in, in co-investor as of late, this GP led, uh, secondary, a single secondary, which we do in Medan, several of them, but it’ll go, you know, one year or another year, it’s slightly different. If you only could do one type of investing, it’s very hard. And also very often the solutions we do, the fact that the same team can do a combination of investing that otherwise might fall in between the buckets is very powerful.
Ross Butler (14:31):
So in larger competitors, would there be a separate team for co-investment, or all your guys, do everything?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (14:38):
All the guys, do everything to avoid things, falling off the cracks and allow for, for more opportunities and more discipline in what we do. And that’s been really helpful. And it’s already evolving, we’re now on our second program, and it’s gone from slightly more funds than you start out, also generate some of the co-invest opportunities to now coming out of the COVID where, this GP led market on the concentrated end, which has been around for a long time, but it’s really exploding. And that suits our skillset because we have built a team of stock pickers, very well. And we don’t, again, because we haven’t got a bucket. We don’t mind, it’s an asset opportunity. We don’t mind if you call it a secondary or a co-invest in what we do. And, also we find that the relationship, uh, from the primary side because the core thing with the GP led is also understanding why, why do they want to do this? And it’s the right thing for them and the acid, which if you have followed funds for 10 plus years, and they know the individuals in these funds, you will have a much stronger view on whether it’s the right thing to do. Not just numerically, but because we focus on both. So you gain that experience from primary funds investing is very helpful across the board. But particularly I would have said in the GPLS single secondary situation
Ross Butler (16:13):
When you’re setting up a new business like this, I guess the challenge is that you don’t have any existing relationships because the best managers will have long-standing relationships, although you were in the market yourself before.
Mirja lehmer-Brown (16:29):
Same thing, the principle of Hayfin, working with very experienced people. So, we hired Gonsalo Aras who co-led this, the private equity solutions team with me are very experienced from different some overlapping, but predominantly, uh, different parts of Europe and different types of relationships. So we bring that eminent relationship that you have as an individual is personal, it’s partially linked to the brand. It’s got its widows where you stand for, but moreover, when you’ve gone for, for, you know, over 10 years and, and quarterly knocked on the door on people to have a coffee, the Swedish way to have a coffee, that’s how you build trust that you take with you, because in the end now, in particular, there is so much capital the capital in it says, doesn’t matter. People want to choose an individual relationship that they feel they can work well.
Mirja lehmer-Brown (17:32):
It needs to be a high-quality type of capital, the quality of capital matters, but its excess. And then you go down to a more personal element. Is this an individual? I feel I can trust, is this, we can have a dialogue with somebody that is constructive and helpful to us. And that’s in the end to me why people choose, to work with somebody in a fundraise or in a co-investor opportunity or in this teepee lads, they’re really attractive opportunities. GPs have a choice. And the choice very often in who they select is just part capital and a lot about who you are and what you stand for and what type of relationship that you built.
Ross Butler (18:18):
Yeah, it’s a people business because you’re committing, you’re not just investing.
Mirja lehmer-Brown (18:24):
And I do think the nice thing, the additional benefit from setting up the entrepreneurial side, which originally I didn’t think of. So originally we’re more of the strategy being differentiated, the culture, being different shaded, and also the discipline. And I guess the credit focus from Hayfin to avoid the volatility in the mid-market. But the additional benefit is we are not entrepreneurs. The whole team, we call, is the founder team, every single one of my team, we are together. We are, the founders are our track record together. And we built this from scratch that also when we sit down very often, the mid-market, they’re also founders of their funds. So we can discuss the challenges of hiring people, motivating people, motivating the younger generation with certainly different to kind of the older generation systems, how that work or I see, but it becomes a different type it’s equal partner to partner. And we’ve gone through the trenches in a similar way, which also add to that, you know, the strength of that relationship.
Ross Butler (19:35):
Can I ask, what proportion are you roughly, in terms of, direct fund payments versus the more tactical approaches, co-investment and secondary and so on, and where, where would you like to be?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (19:48):
You know, the core initially is the flexibility and the first program. So the first investment program was more than 55% funds and, you know, 45% asset opportunity because we don’t really split whether it’s co-invest or a GP-led opportunity. Out of COVID came an additional need for asset capital. It was too much, co-invest capital, but not always co-invest capital in the professional form. And, you know, out of it came, people want to work with a professional partner, a partner from the co-invest, not just in this indication, a partner that can be fast and have their own view, their own view of the asset that underwrite the asset themselves. They, you know, through COVID there were issues in co-invest and some, LP co-investors were worried about the performance and that created some friction in the relationship, the GP and LP so that, you know, the evolution of that was that the GP was happy or to work with somebody who did their own work.
Mirja lehmer-Brown (21:05):
So, you know, if we pick wrong, it’s not the GP’s fault, it’s our team’s fault that this, we would never blame a GP for offering us an opportunity. It’s our own process. And we would, you know, I don’t like blaming, but we will make mistakes, but we will be in ourselves. So that I think has been very, positive. So we’ve actually seen way more co-invest opportunities than I thought beyond the fund investments that we do. And then as I indicated, this deeply led market, this is full exploding. So the new program that we’ve started, or the second program we start,
Ross Butler (21:40):
Can I just ask you a question about, co-invest first, and then you can tell me about GP.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (21:46):
I’m just going to say, so the proportion is 70%. So now 70% asset opportunities and 30% funds
Ross Butler (21:51):
I’m sorry, you still answering my question.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (21:54):
I was trying to
Ross Butler (21:57):
It’s a different skill set, isn’t it? Assessing single asset opportunity versus, and so you’ve got a team of eight and they’re already looking at fund investment co-investments and these tactics, and, but they’re also looking at, company’s specific opportunities.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (22:12):
So the co-invest, that’s why in the secondary market, it’s been a lot of this LP stake. So when an LP center sells to another LP, we don’t focus on that. That’s very different. It’s broad, diversified portfolios, it’s more cashflow pricing. So that’s not, it’s a very good market to be, but it’s not what we do, but where we have married every single one that we have hired, our focus on developing skills, in picking an asset, which is also aligned with, HayFinn is just from a credit perspective versus the equity perspective. In addition, my view has always been that if you are a good fund investor, that will help you as well to understand because when we select an asset, it’s not used to kind of do the numbers on whether that is a good investment. We very often need to understand why is that GP the best owner of that assets?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (23:11):
Why would they be the good part of helping the value creation in that business? And that are more aspects that you focus on from a fund investment perspective. So certainly, you know, it’s certainly super value add even if the core skill to a degree is the fact that peeling the onion on the investment on an asset investment opportunity. That’s why, if you now go and look at very often the large secondary funds, they have predominantly priced cashflows because the market on the LP stakes side was so much bigger. They need to carefully think if they now, recycle their individuals to look at this more focused opportunities on the secondary side. One very often risk-return spectrum, very different from this portfolio, diversified cash flows. And as you rightly said, the skill set needed to do that is also very different.
Ross Butler (24:16):
So kind of from a philosophical perspective, your team feels almost more aligned with the GP mentality than perhaps the traditional institutional LP mentality. Would that be fair?
Mirja lehmer-Brown (24:28):
I think that’s a very good observation because we work very much like a GP. We source a lot of situations and we are very disciplined around the picking, and think much more like an act in that sense, much more like a GP.
Ross Butler (24:48):
What is it that attracts you? What would you look out for?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (24:51):
That’s a very interesting question and actually linked, uh, the mid-market and pitfalls of the mid-market. Because if you look at the larger funds, CVC, or admin, it doesn’t tend to be people-dominated anymore. They have very strong processes. They have sector teams, they’ve got lots of operators around, they still need to be mindful about culture and how they drive organizations, but it’s a different type of diligence. In the mid-market, it’s much more, person and culture-dependent. When I started in 2006, the, um, the way people did fund investing back, that was much more numerical. You went through a track record and then, you know, from that track record, you looked at the processes and the track record. And I thought, oh, this must be good people in the future as well. And then I said, but how can that be?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (25:47):
Because that investment will never come back. So the motivation of, and the process of choosing it and the skill set in the people align, those are the more important elements to review in order to access future performance. So in my own learning, coming from the sell side, it took some work, but I really felt that that lots of people went about it the wrong way, just focusing on numbers. So from that came a completely different type of filter, a hundred-point scoring system that, in addition to strategy and, processes and track record very much focused on the culture. Leadership, what are the motivators? Why are these people doing this. Organization? And the room in the ration linked to organization. Decision-making, functional team, dysfunctional, and those elements are much harder to assess, and to figure out, you need to look for them and you need to build that pattern recognition to see what works, what doesn’t work.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (27:08):
We are very focused on team-based. Very team-oriented, team-based decision-making teams, where also remuneration tends to be diversified if you will, rather than very strong founder-led businesses, because we think it is, reducing risk as one element. And the fact that back to what we said, that you haven’t got the dominating individual that shut challenge out, it could temporarily look good, but again, that’s a risk from our point of view. And very often when we go in meetings, the questioning is very much. So why are you here? What motivates you over and over again, with every person in the team to get the sense for what they’re saying, what they’re not saying, and, the general, yeah. To try to assess that culture again, because that we have found is a core KPI in assessing future performance.
Mirja lehmer-Brown (28:15):
You need to have local reference points, not their reference points. Very often, I say, that’s why it’s so fundamental to us to be local. Well, I’ll figure out I’ve gone to school with you. Uh, you know, in that referencing is there is a joined connection. We’ll have worked together. We will have gone to the same school, I’ll know someone that knows someone that will know your neighbor in order to that picture, that you tend to portray of you and your team, whether we feel that that’s transparent and true. So we do that first-time funds, which we do. We tend to do 50 reference calls, most of them off a list, and that you can only do if you have long-standing relationships on the ground that trust. And we’ll tell you because they know that your integrity is integral to who you are.
Mirja lehmer-Brown (29:11):
They will tell you how it is, and that is impossible to recreate if you’re far away and impossible to recreate in the mid-market because the regions are so different. Yes. So the portfolio is doing, doing well. Is it really well? Yes. And I think the third thing with this and discuss starting in 2018, setting it up, I thought we would have had a recession since 2016. So I was a bit afraid of 2018 as a starting point in setting up a new program. And so the third part of how we were doing it was to focus on a really resilient, resilient sector and resilient business model. And that was predominantly the timing, the 2018, and that belief in, within the investment period, there will be a correction. And from that, and LinkedIn to in Europe, you haven’t got as many sector funds as in comparison to the US but we believe in sector funds in that, again, it’s the pattern recognition.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (30:15):
If you spend way more time in one sector, you can reuse your learnings much faster. And with that, the portfolio with them put into the ground in the first program is 70% healthcare and technology combined. And the rest is resilient service model. So clearly we had no idea about the health crisis, but we’re preparing for a correction. So with that sector waiting not only is our performance, the operational performance of the businesses doing exceptionally well, however, from being a high priced environment, the investment that we’ve done has rerated because now everybody wants to do healthcare and technology and resilient sustainable business model. So we have been fortunate not only to have an operationally well-performing portfolio but something that is also been rerated from a relations perspective.
Ross Butler (31:20):
Fantastic.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (31:21):
And a bit of luck is not bad.
Ross Butler (31:24):
What are the circumstances that you think are legitimate and would attract you to a GP led and what would turn you off?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (31:32):
It’s evolved initially the, GP leads were for assets. Maybe they hadn’t gone that well and maybe needed a little bit. They still, so the GP believed in that asset, in the value creation of it, but it had taken longer. So that was a position, I mean, necessarily not a weakness, but it wasn’t a strength. And that has evolved what people now are focusing are really trophy assets, assets that are significant winners and with the pricing environment and additional competition, that are now out there, it’s really hard to find really good businesses. So if you have built a great relationship or maybe even changed and put them place a phenomenal management team in a very resilient business, but the underlying structure of a private equity fund is such that after a period of time, you need to liquidate it, you can argue. So why would I sell this to a larger fund for them to create more value?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (32:41):
When I got hold of this company helped build this to better business, and my LPs can continue to be the beneficiaries of this good returned. So we think creativity is positive. It’s giving GPs more optionality in a market where it’s hard to find those assets. It’s not like every asset in a fund is of that exceptional quality that we are looking for, so that you de-risk it, from buying him to the next three to five years, you know, making a new plan and, and a feeling that this is a good thing to keep that business. I guess it’s linked to, if you look at the public markets, I don’t know the exact statistics, but a significant percentage of the increased market value or the value creation is actually linked to a very small group of companies. So again, the significant winners tend to be the one that continues to drive premium value creation. And those are the ones people tend to want to want to get hold on to. And with that, it needs to be high-quality process clearly, cause there can be conflict in that decision, but it also needs to be alignment. So you can’t just do it because you want to increase a UM you need to also align yourself also with your own, the GP capital, and behave as a buyer and a seller in that situation.
Ross Butler (34:21):
And do you normally, have to partner with other providers, or do you do the GP secondary on a solitary basis?
Mirja lehmer-Brown (34:28):
So depending on size, we tend to invest 20 to 15 million in an investment, either be the fund or a situation. So we have had a number of situations from these discussions going out, speaking to the GP community where we have been in a bilateral discussion to two LPs, if you will, into a situation. Cause we don’t want to be midority. We are minority investors if you will. An LP minority investors to then the largest situations where it’s more a larger group, you know, from five to 10 different investors into that asset.
Ross Butler (35:13):
And you said you’re seeing quite a few of these opportunities out there probably because things are becoming so polarized.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (35:20):
Yes, it continued to go, we say, you know, let’s see right now it’s math, it’s the fastest-growing part of the second dairy market. No question. And there are a number of opportunities. So I think this will go on certainly for the next two to three years, but there’s always something else that happened. It could be one or two of them that maybe don’t perform that well, but you can also see a lot of people are hiring. A lot of different companies are hiring to address the growth in this market. So whilst it’s certainly going to grow for the next few years, I do believe some people are certainly banking on it growing for a long period of time ahead, but we don’t need it because we have other opportunities to, to invest in as far.
Ross Butler (36:13):
In terms of how your team, your business, as it was sits within Hayfin, sits within the culture, but also the strategy and any kind of cross-fertilization of ideas and opportunities. How does that work?
Mirja lehmer-Brown (36:29):
You know, initially again, more experienced people, more pattern recognition, and in different fields, that can be a value add. So just the fact that we know, GPs, where also from the credit side, they might lend into businesses is intelligence people, intelligence networks are always helpful, different angles based on different experiences. And that’s been very easy. It’s very easy because it’s easy to, to me, you need to be careful about some of the walls. So it’s, you don’t share detailed information, but quality of people or whether they got experienced or not in that type of field is something from the PE side that can be helpful. We came with much more of ESG processes because it started earlier on the equity side in Europe than on the credit side. So we work very closely together. You know, the PE team has been able to do ESG profiles of when the credit side work with P houses, we are involved from an ESG perspective from a profiling point of view, rather than they do the deal clearly kind of ESD analysis themselves.
Mirja lehmer-Brown (37:49):
So it’s very beneficial what we’ve now started to do. And that’s even more exciting, is we can make investments together back into what we’ve said instead of staying in silos. We have now two recent deals where we work together with the special opportunities side in creating a capital solutions for AGP into an investment where there’s a peak element and an equity element. And they are not that many of our competitors that actually can stitch together tailored solutions across credit and equity for a situation which, we are about to do our second now and I just expect that to continue. So that then start to, you know, even deeper working together across the teams and then the practice based on this team-based, culture in that, we are, we are super happy if we can work together and create solutions.
Ross Butler (38:53):
So it’s an equity co-invest with a credit element attached to it, all from the same provider. And how does your decision-making process in terms of governance work and how does it align with the rest of Hayfin?
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (39:08):
So we have our own investment committee. So, you know, the private equity investment committee contains about the senior members of our team and senior members of Hayfin and the special opportunities have a different investment committee clearly. There are some joint members and the learnings from one will apply to the other, but it’s also the focus. Again, the credit focus is different. The type of analysis is somewhat different, different from depending on what angle you come from. Yeah. And, something that was super beneficial was coming into this, COVID, working together was actually, we have a tremendous high yield and syndicated loans team, which are operating in the liquid markets. And with that, a higher degree of macro focus, that goes into their analysis. So coming into COVID, nobody, we’ve experienced the financial crisis, but not this a health crisis members, senior members from the whole firm working together, trying to figure out what is this, is it temporarily or is it something that we’re going to go into. A lot of people are going to die for a long time and it’s going to be a very different type of situation. So Gina Germano and her team had lots of phenomenon analysis that was very helpful in creating scenarios, right?
Mirja lehmer-Brown (40:44):
Where do we think we’re going scenario setting that was helpful for all of us. And as a group, as a house, we then come up with a scenario that we used as a base case and, every week or so we were assessing, is these the data points that are coming? Is this a valid scenario? And I think that allowed us also in 2020, where a lot of people, at least up until after the summer did not deploy that much. We were able guided by facts and scenarios and analysis working together. Our conclusion was that we can deploy. And we had a record year in 2020, across the board deploying in our different, product areas based on his intelligence and views of working together.
Ross Butler (41:36):
Did the private equity industry is a little bit slow at deploying during, during 2020, but, I mean, it’s a very difficult time because the economic situation has never looked more uncertain. I personally, I think, it still looks incredibly uncertain, and most private equity firms don’t have a chief economist. They don’t tend to even worry about the macro view in my experience so much, they take a view on people, but in a situation of radical uncertainty, perhaps they might need to take more of a view. I mean, I’d be, I’m sure it’s all trade secrets, but I’d be fascinated to know in general terms, what your outlook is with regards to the economic prospects of Europe.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (42:18):
And I think you’re absolutely right. I think there are all sorts of elements that go into kind of the analysis of what you do. And I do think some of the larger houses definitely apply and have asset allocators based on more the macro, the research macro judgment helping in selecting the underlying businesses. And, you know, we are with that, you know, low growth, uh, for sure in general is something that we think will be here. We had the health crisis currently the aftermath of that is energy issues, supply chain issues, and still too much liquidity into the system. So whilst, you know, over the next little while is, seems like it’s still catch-up effects in a positive sense that are trending. There are certainly clouds out there that could lead them to volatility.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (43:18):
So I think volatility, in general, is here to say, that’s why with the math typically trying to focus on thematic sectors, which have then growth. So megatrends that, that provide tailwinds. And that’s also LinkedIn. So initially when we said we’re focusing on healthcare and technology, it was more around the fact that we liked that pattern recognition. We liked the defensibility of it in preparation for a correction, but as we evolve and the content constantly need to reassess what we do, we’ve come to think because of the volatility and because in general, lower growth in Europe, if we focus on an aging population, if we focus on digitalization, those are longer-lasting trends that are structural, and we’ll continue to see growth, even if lot of other areas will temporarily go down in a volatility in order downwards adjusted scenario.
Ross Butler (44:24):
In terms of your, your own, section within Hayfin, what does the future hold in terms of growth? And do you have a growth strategy? Is it to just gradually increase your number of relationships or would you consider introducing, I’m not sure of the exact term for it, but the new sources of funds or even grow by acquisition of competitors.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (44:47):
So, I think we were all growth-minded. So in order to continue to evolve, there needs to be some growth. And with that, we’re having a number of conversations with other similar parties, similar to BCI. So we will grow somewhat by adding, a more diversified investor base, but still though, and that’s very similar, across, Hayfin we do believe in being disciplined, you need to grow. That’s a positive for any organization also for the younger generation coming through. You need to show growth, but not for the sake of it. So disciplined growth. We still believe in ensuring that the right balance in how much you wanted the blot and that’s what’s leading us to the amount of capital we’ll take on. The strategy it’s scalable, particularly on a GP led or some of the co-invest we could have, instead of doing the 20 to 50 million, we could easily have invested a hundred million in several of those situations and the same goal with the fund, but not necessarily 500 million. So ask the market evolves, we will evolve with it, but we will stay on the discipline side because the discipline is also the guiding light that will allow us to act before.
Ross Butler (46:25):
Great. Well, the very best of luck with it, Mirja, it’s been really nice hearing about your startup story, I guess.
Mirja Lehmer-Brown (46:32):
Thank you very much for having me, my pleasure.
Ross Butler (46:36):
You’ve been listening to the Fund Shack podcast, make sure you subscribe and visit our website at fund-shack.com for many more video interviews. It’s the private capital channel for alternative investment professionals. Thanks for listening.