Andrew Greenberg, GVC | Evolution of the M&A Market: A Journey from Information Asymmetry to AI-Enhanced Efficiency

Sean Mooney:
Welcome to the Karma School of Business, a podcast about the private equity industry, business best practices, and real-time trends. In this episode, we have a wonderful conversation with my friend Andy Greenberg, CEO of Greenberg Variations Capital. This episode is brought to you today by BluWave. I'm Sean Mooney, BluWave's founder and CEO. BluWave is the go-to expert of those with expertise. BluWave connects proactive business builders, including more than 500 of the world's leading private equity firms and thousands of leading companies to the very best professional service providers for their critical, variable, on point and on time business needs. Enjoy. I am very excited to be here with my friend Andy Greenberg, who's CEO of Greenberg Variations Capital. Andy, great to be here with you today.

Andy Greenberg:
Great to be here with you, Sean. Looking forward to it.

Sean Mooney:
Yeah. So as listeners might surmise, Andy and I have known each other a little bit, so if we get a little casual, forgive us in advance, but we're going to have a great conversation here. We're going to talk a little bit about Andy's background. We're going to talk most of the time about how the face of the M&A markets have changed quite a bit over time, and then we'll talk about some other fun stuff. So maybe to jump right in, Andy, I would love to get a little bit more on your origin story. Can you tell us a little bit, kind of your life story, how you came up in the world, finance, entrepreneurship, where you are today, all those types of things?

Andy Greenberg:
Sure. As you know, my career took an early, kind of crazy detour. I grew up here in suburban Philadelphia where I live and have spent most of my career. I went to college at Brown Law School at Harvard and was always a pretty business-minded law student, interested in venture capital and finance. But I was like a year into law practice with the firm that is now Faegre Drinker and through a fluky series of events, I got involved in a political campaign. A guy named Bob Casey Sr. was running for governor of Pennsylvania, he got elected and at age 26, I was part of a small coterie of young people around the governor. So I went from being beaten on to check on post effective statements with the SEC to working in Harrisburg, and I worked in what was then the Department of Commerce. It's now called the Community and Economic Development. And after a few years at age 30, I became the secretary of the department, so I had an early heady experience in politics and government.

Sean Mooney:
Wow. So secretary of Commerce at the age of 30, and that is something that I never knew about you before we did this podcast here. So tell me, what was it? What do you even do as Secretary of Commerce of the state?

Andy Greenberg:
Two things. First, manage a series of grant and loan programs that fund business development and infrastructure and encourage businesses to locate or expand in the state. And that world has changed over the past 25, 30 years, just as government spending has shifted and interest rates have come down. But going back to the eighties and nineties, that was really the heyday of state industrial development. The other responsibility was acting as spokesperson for the business community on economic issues.

And there, I picked up a discipline that I think has been helpful as an investment banker. Bob Casey Sr., a wonderful guy, a true New Deal democrat. So on every issue of interest to business, labor issues, government regulation, taxes, he could pretty reliably be expected to line up on the side opposite the business community. So as a young guy, I had to learn how to maintain my credibility with that constituency without giving up the guy in the big office, and you can just kind of relate to it to the balance that we all need to have as deal professionals.

Sean Mooney:
You're playing, I'm sure, multidimensional chess with pretty high stakes and a lot of probably sophisticated people had been in that game for a long time. And when I think back when I was 30, I was barely trusted to even anecdotally negotiate a term term sheet and you're work-

Andy Greenberg:
Well, for sure. And in 1995, I left and as I said to you before we were taping, I think we all have decisions in our careers that we value and ones we regret. One of the best decisions I made was getting out of government then. I sold that stock at a five year high. I did not want to continue. I had an opportunity to get into investment banking with Brown Brothers Harriman. I was based in Philadelphia, but I spent a lot of time with the people in New York. And you said you didn't know about the political background.

I think it's only in recent years that I've started talking about it more because early on, it was such a jarring disconnect. I was a mid-level banker learning how to do DCF analysis from younger colleagues, so having had this experience in government, it was like I was a child actor who had been in a successful TV show and now I was expected to be in a Broadway play and I'd never had acting lessons. So it wasn't really helpful to talk to people about the whole political thing until I backfilled and developed some skills in finance.

Sean Mooney:
Andy, not to age you and not to age me, but what point in time was this? So you're going from politics into investment banking around what time?

Andy Greenberg:
Mid-'90s.

Sean Mooney:
Mid-'90s.

Andy Greenberg:
1995.

Sean Mooney:
Okay. So we're very much in that same kind of vintage of entering into investment banking, and I think that's a really good segue as we talk about this changing face of M&A. What did M&A look like in the mid-'90s and thereabouts?

Andy Greenberg:
Well, this will be the part of the program where you and I get to establish ourselves as true old farts.

Sean Mooney:
[inaudible 00:07:32]

Andy Greenberg:
I'm a little older than you, but from the perspective of people who are getting into the field now or in the past 10 years, it was much more pick and shovel work. The market was less efficient. From the perspective of bankers, people kind of had their relationships. There were not processes where hundreds of books were being sent out in part because we didn't send stuff electronically. We did it by FedEx and clients, they didn't want to pay for analysts to print and mail out 300 books, so everything took longer. The world is making the transition from Lotus 1, 2, 3. You and I are just too young to remember VisiCalc.

But Excel was just getting the upper hand over Lotus and as you and I have discussed, everything was labor. Assembling a peer group was not something done effortlessly and quickly. You had to put in parameters and wait for a download. If you were getting together information on publicly traded comps, again, no download. Depending on where you worked, you were sweet talking the librarian to get Edgar filings for you, and then you had to go through them. So people in our age bracket like to think that there was a lot of learning in going through those steps, but there's no doubt that it just took more effort than the same tasks do now.

Sean Mooney:
Oh, 100%. I think the reason why I was one of the more kind of sought after financial analysts in the mid to late-'90s was because I was really good at binding books. To paint a picture for people, you had printers in your offices and you would print them up, and then we all had mail rooms where there were people who were there ostensibly to bind these books together that would then go into FedEx. But inevitably, you wouldn't get your comments until midnight and then you'd have to redo all the books because then the graphic artists were gone. And then at 3:00 AM, you would start printing these things and then at 5:00 AM, you would start binding them if the meeting was in New York that next day. And so I was really good at binding books, and so I think I was sought after not because of anything I do about wattage or analytical skills, et cetera, it's I got fewer paper cuts than others and I could print well. But that was the '90s.

Andy Greenberg:
And you were working downtown in Manhattan?

Sean Mooney:
Yeah. We were in Midtown. So I was in Houlihan Lokey's financial restructuring group, and so luckily a lot of our meetings were in New York, which meant that I could work all night every night because we didn't have to get it.

Andy Greenberg:
You probably had a hierarchy of FedEx pickup times where you do it. You're building the box on the corner-

Sean Mooney:
100%, and you take a car service to the later one. And if that didn't work, we actually had a service that would pick up a plane that was on call to actually pick up the decks at any time, and then there would be a $5,000 delivery fee to fly it somewhere. It was like the good old times. I don't know about you, but as we think about these times, everyone thinks it was so much easier back then. It wasn't, just because there was so much more asymmetry in efficiency and information gathering, et cetera. So it was still really hard because it was just so much harder to do things versus today, the world's your oyster. Everything's in your hands.

Andy Greenberg:
Well, we also had to think through more things. Rather than relying on some algorithm to determine whether a peer was a peer, you had to go through those filings and look at a public company and see what percentage of revenues in the business group were associated with the business you were working with and you had to make a judgment call. And you're a younger person, you talked about it with the VP who was on the job. As I said before, it was more pick and shovel work. And I am not one to say that people in the past were sharper than people today. I think we get to work with a lot of plenty sharp young people, but they get their sharpness from different experiences because they're not called on to do that.

Sean Mooney:
Absolutely. And things are always just different, but they're not necessarily easier in one time or another. And whether you're talking about the NDA or investment banking or private equity, there's different times and things evolve. And I think you're totally right. I think today it's still very much an apprenticeship business, but just in different ways and you're able to maybe jump through some of the picks and shovels a little bit more, and it's more about the in some ways, how things you can jump past that first step a bit. And so maybe that's a good segue, Andy. You've been in the business, you've seen it evolve. How has the business evolved today versus maybe those grand old times when we were starting off? What does it look like today versus then?

Andy Greenberg:
I think it has evolved significantly even over the past decade, and BluWave has perfectly encapsulated some of the trends that I'm about to talk about. Since leaving Brown Brothers, I've spent most of the past 15, 20 years with middle market investment banks, again based here, more generalist in nature, but primarily focused in working with industrial businesses. 10 years ago, I think the coin of the realm was relationships and distribution, and investment banking firms got mandates by being able to impress clients with industry knowledge as a means to an end. And the end was relationships with strategic and financial buyers and an affinity where the person who was a step removed in the pitch would be talking about multiples and macro trends, and the specialist would be able to say, "Oh, Charlie, is he back from his skiing injury? They're getting to be inquisitive again."

Clients can judge three things. They can judge whether they like you, they can judge whether they think you're smart and they can judge whether you know their world. And that really emerged and the industry boutiques and the larger higher volume middle market deal shops, their coin of the realm was just having more distribution based on that, being able to get out more books quickly into the hands of informed buyers. I started Greenberg Variations Capital in 2019 because I saw that movement toward industry specialization. I wanted to continue to work with businesses across a somewhat broader range of sectors in the industrial field, so I saw the subset of business owners who, for good reason, were not headed for a far-flung auction.

It was one, two, five or six buyers. And I don't really like one buyer, two to six optimal. So they didn't need and didn't want to pay for the staffing, the infrastructure and all of the stuff of the auction. So GVC basically uncoupled marketing from execution and we just provide execution, so that's my path to a more structured approach. And then of course, you don't need me to tell the BluWave story, but I've watched you build a business also based on private equity firms and the deal ecosystem, seeking a more and more refined view of a given business.

Sean Mooney:
I think you brought up a number of I think really, really good examples of what's happened, and I thought you very elegantly summed up what happened to a lot of the market. As I turned my lens backwards in the late '90s, early 2000s, it was almost the pendulum has kind of gone fully. Back in the late '90s there was information asymmetry, and so there were trusted advisors who had access to information and network that no one else had. The world was a smaller place. And then tons and tons of private equity firms and investment bankers came in, and then the world became more and more efficient.

The name of the game in the mid-2000s to maybe the mid-2015s-ish was large numbers and efficiency. So the investment bankers would do a 200 PE firm auction with another 50 strategics involved, and it was just brute force, boil the ocean and that would drive an outcome. But then what happened in my mind since that point was then you entered this era of there's so much efficiency, they entered a new age of enlightenment both on the investment banker and the private equity side where specialization became important, where it all became about alpha not beta because beta used to get you results and the returns were good enough for private equity firms and the money was good enough for investment bankers.

And I think what you really, really appropriately pointed out is we're in this new era and now it's about specialization, and it's about being better at fewer things and really driving insights to drive outcomes. And that's true, we certainly saw it in the private equity side and that's really why I founded BluWave was I needed alpha. I needed specialization, I needed the right resource for exactly what I needed when I need it. And I think in the same thing you're articulating in the investment banking world, it's about knowing what's going to happen before they do it and not brute forcing it because that gives you beta, and what you're doing at Greenberg Variations Capital is bringing alpha. And so I'd love to maybe drill down on that a little bit.

Andy Greenberg:
Well, it goes to your comment about information asymmetry. There are certainly still industry sectors and deals where it makes sense to have a wide open process with the idea of capturing an outlying bid. But I talk to friends, I'm sure you do too, and the most active middle market investment banks, and they don't talk about the auction in as many processes as they used to. And there is more information on the business owner side and it's very easy to caricature the owner-operator as like the classic data miner and the guy who remembers the one deal that was done 11 times in his industry and beats you over the head with that, but information is information and somebody builds a successful business is usually pretty shrewd even if they are pushing investment bankers to be more aspirational.

So I do think that, to your point about alpha, there are more processes where market clearing value is going to be within a relatively narrow range. And what the market wants on both sides is efficiency, certainty of close and quick, thorough ventilation of the issues that could cause a deal to go sideways. And that's where my approach comes in and that's where the appetite comes in for a sponsor calling you and not necessarily looking for a general, broad industry view, but say, "Hey, we're buying this type of business and we need somebody who can talk to us about how production lines are assembled in this industry," and there's an answer for that.

Sean Mooney:
100%, and that's exactly the questions we get. It's like we have a company that is a food manufacturing company that has high mix, low volume manufacturing for the organic food snack business and the companies in the Midwest, and we need someone to both assess it but then also live in the plant for six months. And it used to be 15, 10, even five years ago, even shorter than that, it used to be I need a Lean Six Sigma person because you need to get every little element right. Like times right now, we've got the deal market is in effect right now and it could be I need a commercial due diligence provider, and it used to be I'm going to go to the large firm that everyone knows that does commercial due diligences.

And on that same vein, they're like, "No, I need the commercial due diligence group that knows the high mix, low volume, multi-tier distribution food snack manufacturer in the Midwest who already knows that world." And so I think that you're right in that that's where the world maybe is and is going. And to your point, the information can be available not only for the private equity firms, but in the same vein, the investment bankers are continually evolving in their own. And so maybe let's talk a little bit about that in terms of how did that lead you to what that in mind to bring Greenberg Variations Capital to be?

Andy Greenberg:
What I saw in my investment banking practice... and also we haven't talked about GF Data, the data company that Graham Frazier and I started in 2005... was that industry expertise as it was practiced and marketed by investment banks generally had to do with buyer identification qualification and relationships. It didn't have to do with building and articulating the value proposition. So I would say to someone today that if you have a business in one of these high multiple commercial services, HVAC, services being provided to HOAs where you don't really know how high is high, go and hire an investment bank that's going to market the hell out of the property because they're the center of gravity is with the marketing.

But there are other businesses, as I said before, where valuation can be higher or lower within a trading range, but the center of gravity in the assignment is understanding where you need to take the clients to cement a value proposition that will carry through to closing. So in the past year we've done a couple of deals in medical devices, extremely profitable, highly valued businesses. I am not a boutique authority in the medical device industry, but I understand looking at strategic buyers owned by private equity groups on the other side that the value proposition there is helping them understand with incredible particularity in each case how an extremely profitable business makes its money.

What are production cycles? What is the usage of material? How is labor dealt with in a business where there's almost no direct labor involved? And whether it's the company's management team or retaining the kind of outside experts that you're involved with, I saw an ability to get involved with business owners away from the wide open auction and say, "Look, there are 5, 6, 8 likely buyers for this business. They're all knowledgeable. None of them needs us to educate them on the market and the opportunity, but let's talk about the questions that they will ask in order to get the closing at the kind of elevated multiple in that industry, double digit to teens multiple, and let's figure out how to make that happen."

Sean Mooney:
So I really like the way that you said that and the way that you were thinking that led you to this business here. In part, going back to what you said earlier, there are certainly a time and place for the big firm, big process or a different type of methodology that they're going to be taken from the larger shops, but there's absolutely another place in that market to have this curated experience where you know who the buyers are and you don't need to necessarily do the big machine. And it resonates a lot with me from my investing days where those were the types of almost companies that we had looked for.

It's like we're not going to try to own a market or be everything to everyone, we're going to try to be good at one part of the market and be really good at that. And we were very successful doing that, and you've taken that same approach to investment banking advisory and I think that's got to resonate really well. In the same vein, with your approach, you're not turning companies upside down because when we would go through the big machine, and I think that's evolving in many places, but when we would do it, your company was just exhausted by the time you got through it.

Andy Greenberg:
Right, right. It requires a very cold-eyed, realistic view of every situation because there are a lot of scenarios that get presented as a targeted process and they shouldn't be, really. Owner of a business got a call from a business development person or a buy-side search firm, and they happened to get him in the office and now he feels like, "Well, what does this mean?" Well, it could be that there are three or four dozen private equity groups that would be interested in that business as a platform, and it's not a good use of my time to try to suggest anything else to them, but it works the other way.

We get referred into situations by attorneys, wealth managers and other trusted advisors, and it often is helpful for the clients to have come from discussions with more traditional M&A firms where part of the pitch was being talked into something that they didn't really want to do. There was a theory of why it made sense to be interested in a handful of buyers and for a traditional investment bank, it's not really economical to do that. The way we're set up, if you're doing little marketing and focusing on execution, you could charge less. So we price at a discount to what a traditional M&A firm would charge for the fully loaded sales mandate. If they work with us on a one-off and it becomes something else and they don't want to continue, then I don't want to make their life contractually complicated. So they like the fact that we just focus on the thing.

Sean Mooney:
I love that approach. And when in some ways it's kind of treat the business of your business like a business and have the audacity to ask your customers what they want and they'll tell you, and you're providing a solution that's needed and wanted in the market to people going through one of the most important decisions of their life. And so I think that's got to come off really well with them when you're able to put it all out there, listen to what they want and respond, and for that, they give you all the trust in the world with their most important asset probably of their life, other than their friends, family and children.

Andy Greenberg:
Exactly right.

Sean Mooney:
At least family and children.

Andy Greenberg:
Some of their kids.

Sean Mooney:
At least one of their kids. So I think that's a good thing to transition here on in that we've talked about where the market has come from, where it is today. With this really unique vantage that you have, where do you see it going in the visible future?

Andy Greenberg:
Setting Sean Moony aside for the time being, for me, the most memorable guest that Charlie Gifford and I have had on our podcast, Middle Market Musings, was Eugene Fama, the Nobel Prize-winning economist at University of Chicago and the father of efficient market theory. And I think in many ways, we're living out the prophecy of Fama and his colleagues, that the market is becoming more and more and more efficient. And artificial intelligence has become a big part of the discussion, and I think you and I agree that there's both steak and sizzle there.

Sean Mooney:
Absolutely.

Andy Greenberg:
But I think that directionally, the process of selling businesses will continue to evolve in the direction of applying expertise to prospective buyers, the company and the value proposition as opposed to the brute force of the marketing exercise.

Sean Mooney:
I 100% agree that efficiency is the constant in this industry, in any industry, really. And if you think, most people don't realize that the capital markets world is an industry, right? And it started off in the '80s and '90s and maybe early 2000s and it was relatively inefficient. More information came to bear. This thing called the internet came to bear, this thing called the iPhone came to bear. You introduced this great tool called GF Data, that gave everyone insights into key capital market metrics that help make them make their decisions better.

So all of this is playing out into this world that has been gradually maturing, as every industry does, and it seems to me what's happening and what will happen will follow some other markets. And see how they've evolved, they become more sophisticated. With the advent of AI, this is going to be the greatest efficiency enhancer in my mind since the advent of the modern internet in 1995 with Netscape. And so I 100% agree that the world is going to be playing this game and it's going to be, like anything else, harder and harder to find alpha, but it's still going to be really good compared to most other things. So in my mind, it's not a message like woe is me, it's just don't hate the player, I hate the game. We're all going to have to work a little harder.

Andy Greenberg:
And there will still be a role on the buy side for smaller sponsors who have the focus and the tenacity to achieve beta.

Sean Mooney:
Absolutely. And I think the world in some ways, I think in the private equity world, there'll certainly be consolidation of the top of the market. There's going to be more fragmentation at the bottom market like you see, because the big PE firms anyways won't be able to do the smaller end of the market efficiently because they're going to be built to handle the large checks. In the same way, you're going to see that exactly mirrored in the advisory market. The big will probably continue to get bigger and there are going to be the boutiques that address the lower end of the market that in some ways is the most interesting highest returning end of the market, but it's just harder to do at scale. How does that resonate with you?

Andy Greenberg:
It's classic Porter theory. You can't be great at two things at once. So on the sponsor side, it's very hard to excel at gathering assets in volume and at achieving consistent above par returns. You got to pick one. And then on the advisory side, I think it's the same idea, that you can focus on scale or you can focus as I have on a kind of specialization. But Porter's language, you don't want to get middled. And I think in both ends of the industry, the consolidation occurs among firms that are not really disposed to be great at one of the relevant strategies.

Sean Mooney:
I think that is spot on and you very, I think, pointedly portrayed where this world's going if we just look at some of the models that we've all seen to become true in the history. And the one thing that I would say, as you think about the people in this industry, they're incredibly tenacious, they're smart enough. They're clever and they're going to find a way to continue to be successful in what is otherwise a very large set of markets, even as they tectonically move away from each other and distinctively form continents maybe. And one of the things that I would say is I reflect even on these prior changes, and it's been a pretty consistent movement over time, is that every year I would say, "Oh, I wish I was 10 years older," and then 10 years later go, "Oh, I wish it was 10 years older." Well, okay, I'll stop with the tens.

But they were all still good times, it was just relative to maybe a more distant past, it seems like it wasn't as good. And I think when people and I look at 10 years from now, it's going to be like, "Oh, I wish I was 10 years old," but it's still going to be pretty darn good. So maybe as a good turning point here, let's talk about a little bit more about the lighter topics. And one of the things that I think we all do when after a long day and friends like you and I and Charlie, we're at a bar afterwards or something and drinking and being responsible is that we will wax poetic about some of the look in the rear view mirror and the things we knew now that we wish we knew then, and if we only had a time machine. So I'd be really curious, Andy, maybe what's one of these things that you'd go back to young Andy and say, "Hey kid, listen up"?

Andy Greenberg:
Periodically on the podcast I talk about its number one unwilling listener, my 16-year-old son who gets it on the way to school, on the way home for wrestling practice and has no shortage of critical comments. I told him I was doing this podcast and he says, "Is Charlie going to be there?" And I said, "No, it's just me," and he said, "Who's going to listen to that?"

Sean Mooney:
Sounds like my kids.

Andy Greenberg:
So the only line in the New Testament that I quote is, "No man is a prophet in his homeland."

Sean Mooney:
Amen.

Andy Greenberg:
I get a lot of opportunities to use that. So what advice would I give a younger Andy? I think just say yes. As things cross your field of vision, have a disposition to try different things. And I guess the modern fashionable way to say that might be lean in, but of course, I mean it more fundamental than that. I did more sports when I was in junior high school. When I got into high school, I was small. I gravitated to brainy activities like debate. And the guy who was the lacrosse coach at my high school came up to me, he was the history teacher. He came up to me after class one day and he said, "The varsity eight is looking for a coxswain," and I just looked down my nose at it.

I thought coxswain was like glorified equipment manager on the rowing team. That's an example of something I really regret as I've gotten older. I don't know that it would've been a life-changing event, but of course as you learn about that sport and what that means, that would've been a terrific challenge for me. And that's an educator. That's an example of a teacher looking at a kid and thinking, "He does okay in class, but this would be a good thing for him," and I didn't say yes. I think we all get into those situations. We recognize them more readily as we get older, but my advice for younger people would be where possible, try to say yes.

Sean Mooney:
And what would be an example of one of those times where you were going to say no and you said yes?

Andy Greenberg:
That's an interesting question. Where I got into something that was totally outside of my comfort zone. I have never felt as prosperous as when I was a first year law firm associate making $37,000 a year, and leaving that job to work for a long shot political campaign, that took a deep breath. I did it with a buddy of mine, and I told myself that the chances that it would be such a failure that I ended up at Skid Row were small and did it.

Sean Mooney:
I think that's an amazing example. And then you were the Secretary of Commerce of a founding state at age 30. That's amazing.

Andy Greenberg:
Well, right. It paid off, but as I said, it also had a quality of having a kind of heady success early where I needed to go back and pay some dues later. But it worked out.

Sean Mooney:
But that's interesting because it speaks to the way I think of the world is life is not a straight road up and to the right, it's more of a meandering path, but the most straight road to Rome isn't always the fastest or best. And so the example maybe I would use on maybe a wrong turn, but eventually right turn was I grew up in Texas and it was a small school and every kid had to play football because we couldn't fill the team. And our coach was a former All-American tight end for the University of Texas, and so I go into this thing and like you, in eighth grade I was five feet tall and I probably weighed 100. And my freshman year, I think I did something where I couldn't get into it, so sophomore year I'm starting to grow a little bit and springing up, very awkward years.

But the coach looks at me and my dad is 6'4" and my brother is three years younger than me, but was at that point taller than me. And he goes, "Sean, you're going to be tall like your dad, and so we're going to put you at tight end because that's my favorite position." And the only good player we had in our team was the all-state tight end, who grew up on a ranch and chewed tobacco since he was age four." And so immediately, I go out there like, 'You got it, coach." I go out there, three concussions later, every day he's jamming my head into the dirt going down. I had a one-year career in football, but on the up flip side, I then started studying a lot harder. I joined the student council. I found my way. So I left my football career behind, but it led me to another road.

But if I hadn't said then yes to that, I probably would've gone on a whole different path. So I love that example. And you think about the things that we do, they require a lot of time, it's a lot of effort. And one of the things that I'm always kind of thinking about as I've gained a little bit of perspective is how do I find little life hacks that are not only even just business, but just things that make my life a little easier? And so I'd be curious, do you have anything that you've figured out recently or previously where you say, "You know what? This thing makes a lot of sense and boy, I'm really happy that I have this in my world because it just makes things just a little bit easier"?

Andy Greenberg:
Part of my classic dad profile is that I think of myself as a very good griller, so I could give you a recipe, but everyone has their way of making things. So what I will share is that when you are a young parent and you have a booster seat in your car, you will never get another device which is useful for holding a propane tank. So my youngest son is now 16, I still have a booster seat and when I go to get the propane refills for the grill, you just pop it right in and it works great. So that's my life hack.

Sean Mooney:
That is deceptively and quietly brilliant. I'm really, really angry myself right now because why didn't I keep those car seats from when my kids were younger? Because every car I've ever owned has that little slash across the glove box where the propane tank kind of juggles around as I'm driving and just carves up the front of my-

Andy Greenberg:
You make a turn, that loud thunk.

Sean Mooney:
Literally every car.

Andy Greenberg:
My sons would say that that is totally on brand for me. I can't watch a football game without them just rolling at any Progressive insurance commercial and saying, "Oh my God, labeling the trash cans. That's a certain thing that you do."

Sean Mooney:
The Home Depot music. No, that's great. Actually, my youngest sister now has a newborn and she's going down that journey of having her children, and I'm going to remind her right after this call that she needs to save each one of those, and as she moves on to the next booster seat, as the kids progress and get older, I'm going to see how I can get her last one. So I think that's a great life hack.

Andy Greenberg:
Having kids that age and having to strap those booster seats in on an airplane, isn't that like the worst experience that you and your wife have had?

Sean Mooney:
I do not miss that at all. Renting a car afterwards, I'm like, "How do I get them in the car seat?" And if you ask me, I'm like, "Hey, the kids will be fine." My wife said, "You can't do that." She's the wiser one. Don't think less of me, listeners.

Andy Greenberg:
Right.

Sean Mooney:
So Andy, this has been a ton of fun. I really, really appreciate it. I've learned an infinite amount here and I have tons of notes from this, so thank you, thank you for joining us today and sharing your 2 cents.

Andy Greenberg:
Thank you. As always, great to talk with you, Sean.

Sean Mooney:
Absolutely. Special thanks to Andy for joining. If you'd like to learn more about Andy or Greenberg Variations Capital, please see the episode notes for links. Please continue to look for the Karma School of Business podcast anywhere you find your favorite podcast, including Apple, Google, and Spotify. We truly appreciate your support. If you like what you hear, please follow, rate, review and share. It really helps us when you do this, so thank you in advance. In the meantime, if you need to be connected with the world's best-in-class private equity grade professional service providers, independent consultants, interim executives or anything else, give us a call or visit our website at BluWave.net, that's B-L-U-W-A-V-E, and we'll support your success. Onward.

Private equity insights for and with top business builders, including investors, operators, executives and industry thought leaders. The Karma School of Business Podcast goes behind the scenes of PE, talking about business best practices and real-time industry trends. You'll learn from leading professionals and visionary business executives who will help you take action and enhance your life, whether you’re at a PE firm, a portco or a private or public company.

BluWave Founder & CEO Sean Mooney hosts the Private Equity Karma School of Business Podcast. BluWave is the business builders’ network for private equity grade due diligence and value creation needs.