Cici Zheng, ParkerGale Capital | Private Equity Advice on Pricing, Human Capital and More

Sean Mooney:
Welcome to the Karma School of Business podcast. In this episode, we have an amazing conversation with Cici Zheng from ParkerGale. 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 proactive companies, to the very best service providers for their critical, variable, on-point and on-time business needs. Enjoy. We're very excited to have Cici on. So Cici, thank you so much for joining us.

Cici Zheng:
Thanks for having me, Sean. I really appreciate being here.

Sean Mooney:
So for those of you who listen to private equity podcasts, you may recognize Cici's voice. Cici is a co-host of probably the best podcast in private equity, Private Equity Funcast hosted by ParkerGale, which I think everyone talks about. So she's going to come across as much more professional and polished than I am, and so we appreciate Cici being on the other side of the mic for once.

Cici Zheng:
No, well, thank you for having us. We have fun on our podcast, but it's always fun to join someone else's, and definitely not as professional as some of my other colleagues who are more frequently on the podcast, but I will try my best.

Sean Mooney:
Well, this is great. And the other thing that I think some of our listeners might appreciate is that if you've heard the name ParkerGale from us before, ParkerGale is, we think, one of the top private equity firms out there and certainly one of the most innovative ones. And so we awarded them the Private Equity Innovator of the Year earlier this year for very many excellent reasons. And so I think you all figured out the game of private equity in ways that few have. And so it's kudos to you all.

Cici Zheng:
Thank you and thank you for the award. We're really proud of the whole team and the recognition and to be amongst such other great company on your list, but we couldn't have gotten here without all the help that you guys have provided us over the years.

Sean Mooney:
Oh, we appreciate it. And that's how we've come to see behind the curtain that you all see the world in slow motion. And so I've made Cici officially blush here, but it's well-deserved and so we very much appreciate that. So Cici, maybe as we jump in here, I'd love to get a sense for what brought you to the private equity industry. I think people come from all sorts of different paths and routes and journeys into the industry. What was yours?

Cici Zheng:
Yeah, so if we go way back, it was very accidental, is what I'll say. In college, I actually wanted to be a journalist. In high school, I was editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper. I loved writing. I thought I was going to go down this investigative journalism path. But I happened to take my first business class in Penn and my first econ class. I thought this sounded pretty interesting. Happened to be surrounded by a lot of other pre-professional students in college. And before you knew it, I graduated as an investment banker. So I always feel like I went to college, wanted to be a journalist. I joke that maybe I sold my soul and I did investment banking instead. But I really loved learning and I thought that that was a great starting path in my career to learn as much as I can.

I always joke that I felt like I had four years of work experience in two years, given the rigors of an analyst program. But I went from being an analyst in investment banking to not really sure what I want to do next. I just knew I wanted a change from investment banking. And so I interviewed for everything under the sun, private equity, hedge fund, venture capital, sales and trading, investor relations, you name it. I wasn't sure. I just figured I wanted something that I could continue to learn and I'd probably go to business school at some point. So something for two or three years.

And that's when I got my first stint in private equity. I joined a healthcare focused private equity fund in Connecticut at the time. And so as an associate on the investment team, that really taught me how to think critically, which is a little bit different mindset than. Investment banking taught me a lot of the Excel and PowerPoint and financial modeling skills, but private equity as an associate taught me how to put on my thinking cap, how to assess risk. And so that was my first foray into it.

Post-business school, I decided to take a detour into consulting because I still wasn't really sure what I wanted to be when I grew up and I wanted to try different industries. I had started out my career doing healthcare, investment banking and healthcare private equity. So I ended up joining Bain & Company in Chicago. And at Bain, I was able to do a variety of industries, projects. I still rotate through our private equity diligence group, which was my favorite rotation. I think I had always liked deals, I'd always loved commercial due diligence, which you know we do a lot of work together on. And was happily at Bain, thought I would stay there for a while, and I happened to get a headhunter LinkedIn email talking about the opportunity at ParkerGale. And so this was over six years ago.

And at the time I hadn't heard of ParkerGale. I wasn't actually sure what it would be like to join the ops side of private equity. I had a lot of questions about it. But I met the team, really liked what I saw. It seemed like it was a really fun time and a fun chance to build something new, since ParkerGale at the time was still in fund one, and so decided to take the leap from Bain back into private equity on the operating side. And that's where I've been for the past almost six years.

Sean Mooney:
That's an amazing journey. And you've kind of almost had the holy trinity of experiences. You got the investment banking, the consulting, the PE, so you've seen a lot.

Cici Zheng:
I was very indecisive. What can I say? It seems like it was planned, but in reality if you hear it, it was like I wasn't really sure. And I think I just always took the lens that I want to learn as much as I could, I want to work with good people, and the opportunities just happened to present themselves that way.

Sean Mooney:
It's interesting. So this whole concept, and at the risk of sounding zen, which I try my best not to because you shouldn't be coming to me for zen, but it's just like the universe kind of comes to you and it takes you on your path and you kind of end up in the right place if you kind of dare to listen to it. And so it sounds like you got to all these places and it almost seemed formulaic, but you got there in a way that was very organic.

Cici Zheng:
Yeah, I think if you look back, I think LinkedIn will tell you one thing, but I could tell you a lot of other stories and decisions that influenced behind the scenes. It really wasn't planned. I did not even know what investment banking was when I was a freshman in college. I had no idea what private equity was until probably by the time I got into banking. I don't even know if it was on my radar in college at the time. So I think I was always just open-minded, curious, and I felt very lucky and fortunate to be able to meet people and have opportunities presented in a way. And then when the opportunity presented itself, not be afraid to take a leap and try something new.

Sean Mooney:
That's great. And I'd love to dig a little deeper on the journalism thing. And so this is really fascinating because as you think about many facets of journalism, you can see at least the training and the thought process that go and could kind of be very relevant. So, A, Cici, I'm really jealous that you know how to take disparate information and distill it into something that makes sense. I think anyone in our company that knows me will very much appreciate that my mantra is why use one word when two will suffice? So one, that's a skill, two, that must have helped a lot when you're writing CIMs. As an investment banker, I'm sure you were the go-to.

Cici Zheng:
Yeah, well, you had a word limit. You were trained to edit ruthlessly.

Sean Mooney:
And then what was that transition from being this great writer to then speaking in bullet points?

Cici Zheng:
Very different, I'd say, but similar. Because at the end of the day, the bullet points, it's not about the language, it's about the facts and you only have one slide to get your points across, but the essence is still the same. You're trying to convey the most important pieces of information that's tangible to the reader, that's relevant, with as concise language as possible that conveys the story you're trying to tell. Because a lot of times at the end of the day, whether you're doing a CIM or an investment memo, you are also telling a story of why this investment makes sense.

Sean Mooney:
I think what a great background for PE and a great kind of progression towards what you do now as an operating partner in a private equity firm. One of the things that I think you have a very unique vantage on is looking at hundreds of companies a year and then helping a select best build and grow and become something, and often ways they probably were never intended to be, but they in their best self could have or should have been. So when you go and you look at a company and you're trying to say, "Is this something that is a really good company or could be a really good company," what are some of the traits that you look for that gives you perspective and information about the art of the possible?

Cici Zheng:
Yeah, so when we're looking at a new investment, a lot of times we're asking ourselves the questions of do we like this market that this company is playing in? Do we like the company itself within the market? And then why is this a good ParkerGale deal? And we're obviously doing a lot of different elements of diligence, whether it's financial due diligence, legal, accounting, tax, et cetera. I spend a lot of my time focusing on the commercial due diligence side, which is understanding these market questions and then how this asset looks like within it. And within those, we're often looking at what are the actual growth drivers of this business? So I'm asking myself, is this market growing? What's driving that growth? Is it because the underlying market is growing, the volume of people or companies that could use this product or service has increased? Is it because the penetration of this type of software is being adopted more for the first time, or does everyone already have one and you're having to rip and replace?

So we're asking ourselves these market questions and then within the company itself, we're asking like, well, where do we think the growth from the company will come from? Is it from their existing customer base or are you gaining share from your competitors because you are ripping and replacing? And what's the likelihood of that? Are you able to get price increases? So we're building what we call like a growth driver table for each of our diligences, and that helps us assess where do we think high, medium, low, the buckets of growth are coming from. And some areas of growth we have no control over. We can't control the market growth. And from where we sit, we have to be able to be comfortable with whatever those dynamics are. But the company's growth, that's the parts that we can have more control over.

And so when you end up looking at a lot of the companies that we invest in, some of the common traits that they have are, they usually are, these founders have built great products, very sticky, high NPS scores, great customer retention. The founders have typically come from the industry. And so they've built a product that has just grown through word of mouth. And it's usually combined with a pretty immature go-to-market function, I'd say. Very little marketing, very little professional sales, very little professional product management. But when we see this combination of low awareness, that we frequently hear, "We're the best kept secret in the industry," but then when you talk to their customers, they say, "We love this company, we love this product," to us, that's actually a really fun and exciting combination because we see a lot of opportunity. If you have a really great base product, then we think we can drive some of that growth by investing strategically in the go-to-market functions to make sure that they're no longer a best kept secret by the end of our hold period.

Sean Mooney:
I really like your perspectives there. And first, I think it's a great lesson for any investor, any operating partner, anyone who's building a company is find a business that has a good market because the market always wins. It's cliché at this point, but if you've got a great team in a lousy market, the market's going to win. If you've got a great team in a good market, good things are happening. A great team in an excellent market, magic. And so I love that perspective. I also really like how you're talking about these businesses that are successful in spite of themselves. And that was something I coined when I was in PE at our firm is like we wanted businesses that were doing a few things really, really right and haven't even gotten to the other [inaudible 00:12:06].

Cici Zheng:
Yeah, a lot of times, I'm like, "How did you even get to this size?" It's incredible. And just imagine the possibilities with a little bit more investment, a little bit more intentionality. But they've been around for decades and there's so much more that could be done, but they clearly have done very well to get to that size.

Sean Mooney:
They've built these amazing companies, done something where the customers find them, and then if you give them just a little more love and care and attention and resources, it breaks out. And I always thought this successful in spite of itself line was really funny in some way, not funny, but I thought it was kind of a clever little pun that I would use in our Monday morning meetings. And then it became not so funny when we were doing a sports outing and we all had shirts with names that kind of personified us. And on the back of my shirt it said successful in spite of himself. So I was like, I got to change that little moniker now.

Cici Zheng:
But you know what, you're successful.

Sean Mooney:
Exactly.

Cici Zheng:
So that means there's so much more potential.

Sean Mooney:
Absolutely. Sky's the limit for me.

Cici Zheng:
Exactly.

Sean Mooney:
So one of the things that I think you all do really well is this coordination of activity. In private equity firms today, it's a symphony of motion between the deal teams, the operating teams, the portfolio company leaders, and that symphony is often really hard to do seamlessly and well. How do you all think about making sure that all facets are able to be successful in the mutual goal of growing and developing a company?

Cici Zheng:
Sure. So at ParkerGale, our operating team is organized functionally. So because we invest in B2B tech and software companies, the industries, the companies, even though they'll have different end markets, is roughly similar enough that we think we can have repeatable processes. So we're split up functionally, whether it's covering go to market, finance, technology, talent, et cetera. So that's how we operate and align ourselves. But in order to make sure, to the symphony that you're talking about, for me, the biggest lessons learned over the past six years have been making sure that there's alignment between operating partner, CEO of the portfolio companies, and the deal team themselves. Without this alignment between these three buckets, I think it's really hard to get anything done.

So I'll tell you a funny story. When I first started at ParkerGale in my first two weeks, they asked me to go visit one of our portfolio companies, and I was this very eager consultant, fresh out of Bain, slides in my backpack, talking about value creation. I was very excited to meet the CEO. And when I went to go meet the CEO, I got grilled, chewed up, for 30 minutes straight. He was just like, "Who are you? What are you doing here? What's your background? What's your qualification? Why do you want to see my product roadmap?" He was questioning why I was there. He was worried was I a spy from the private equity firm and things like that. And I learned very quickly at that point in time that the relationship building, building that trust with the CEO and the management teams, was one of the most important things that had to be done from the beginning.

I had assumed, or I had thought, I was like, "Well, we own these companies or majority companies. We can force them to do whatever we want them to do. This should be easier than consulting," where you had to influence without direct authority and try to do all these other things. But I realized you needed that same elements of you're still influencing without direct authority because if we didn't have alignment with the CEO, then didn't matter how hard we pushed at the other levels of the organization. And then if the CEO and the deal partner were also not aligned, then it also didn't matter how hard we pushed on these other initiatives.

So for me, I have a great relationship with that CEO now, but I realized it took a lot to say, "I am here to help you. I am a free resource to you based on how we're set up, and no one else wants you to be more successful than I do because I'm not, unlike in consulting, I'm not comped-based on the per week rate or per month rate or how many times I come and see you. No one wants this company to succeed more than I do. And so I'm here to help as much as I can on whatever it is that you need help." And so that trust building, that alignment was really critical, and one of the things that I think we spent a lot more time investing in upfront than I realized that we needed to in the beginning, but I think it's one of the things that helps us make sure we're really collaborative and in sync with our teams.

Sean Mooney:
I think you bring up a really important point that most people from the outside of PE don't appreciate, and that's you think, oh, you own the company and people are going to march.

Cici Zheng:
And not even because it's a dictator type of a power trip. I just thought we would want the same things. I was like, "Don't you want the same things? We should be aligned." But it turns out, especially when you're transitioning a founder-owned company or things like that, it's just the change management. Sometimes we joke we're a change management consulting firm with a little bit of capital behind us. That takes time, that takes trust, that takes relationship building. And if anything, there might be a level of distrust because of the reputation private equity sometimes has.

Sean Mooney:
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And at the end of the day, if you think about what are the rights that you have as a controlling interest owner of a business, you have the right to hire, to fire, to buy, to sell. Everything else is working with really good people and aligning goals and objectives and providing resources to help everyone get there. But we're all humans, and so we have different perspectives on how to get there. So you mentioned this whole idea of building alignment and trust. How earlier, at what point in the process do you get involved with the management team to start forging those relationships?

Cici Zheng:
Sure. So at ParkerGale, our ops team and our investment team are super closely aligned and we sit with each other in the same investment committee meeting on Mondays. So I am aware of all the deals that are coming down the pike. As an operating team, we don't end up spending time with the companies pre-close until close to IOI stage or definitely around LOI stage because most of the other deals are likely not to progress forward. So we're trying to make sure we're balancing the time between the time we could spend with our portfolio companies versus a company that might not make it that far in our investment process.

But we get really involved from the LOI stage. And as I mentioned, it's all hands on deck. When I'm looking at commercial diligence, I'm working with our deal teams hand in hand to make sure we're finding the right partner, that the scope of work is answering the key questions we have for the investment. But it's not just for the sake of investment committee. It's to make sure that we are simultaneously building out our value creation plan pre-close while we're doing this diligence because we want to know as much as possible what are we stepping into, what are the risks, what are the opportunities?

And so we're riding very closely alongside with our deal teams pre-close to make sure we have as much information as possible and then post-close, we're able to hit the ground running, not even within the first hundred days, but within the first week or two. We'll do a management onboarding, CEO onboarding to make sure that we're off to a running start because of the information that we had from diligence, because hopefully we've also met the team during diligence and started building that relationship as well. That helps us make sure we can execute a lot faster and start that transformation journey.

Sean Mooney:
I think that's really important. It's this whole idea that that relationship building, but also the planning on value creation starts before you own the business. And if it doesn't... And it's the idea that we versus me are going to all do this together, and I think you all do that really well.

Cici Zheng:
And to be clear, it's a draft, because at the end of the day, we may or may not have full information from the company, but we also want the management team to own it. So the value creation plan, the first draft of it, that is our opinion based on our investment thesis and our analysis. But in order for that to really live and continue on, we need to sit down with the management team post-close to say, "Here's our hypothesis on what the VCP was. But what do you think? What is realistic?" And then make sure we co-create that together, because it can't just be here's what we dictated, when the people in the business will obviously be so much deeper and know a lot better than us.

Sean Mooney:
I love that cards face up mentality. And if I were to kind of reflect in a candid way on my past, it was probably you would go through, you would close the deal, we all had everything we thought we were going to do with the business. And then we knew that the management team was in some ways compelled to do the rosiest picture during an M&A process, and this up into the right projection where everything goes right. And I would probably go in this in probably arguably a passive-aggressive way and say, "Well, that was really your plan." And they would look kind of awkwardly and go, "Yeah? But that was our plan?" And then you would just wait and kind of watch them squirm for the first three months and then you'd finally say, "Okay, let's do a real plan." So just doing the right thing in the beginning I think is absolutely the spot on way you should do it. So I a hundred percent appreciate that.

As we think about now you're in the process where you're working together to build this business, and we're in this really, really kind of scary, tension-filled, anxious economic period in history right now where it's real easy to circle the wagons and kind of get afraid and try to wait it out. How are you all kind of thematically interacting with your portfolio companies to not only say, "Here, we need to be safe and let's do Maslow's hierarchy of business needs, and food, water, shelter, let's get it right." But also how do you find opportunity? How do you say, "Well, everyone else is circling the wagon. Let's figure out a way where we can continue to go forward."

Cici Zheng:
Sure. So for us, I'd say over the past few years, we've always, when we make our investments, they've always been with the mind of some kind of growth angle. We're not industrial investors where we're looking to do a big procurement program or anything like that. So we've always had the emphasis on growth. But I'd say in the past few years, especially in the tech sector, the emphasis has been a lot more on profitable growth. No surprise.

I think some of the other areas that we're trying to find opportunity are one area is in pricing. So I think if you think about how much the input costs have gone up, even if you just ask for a while, it was so competitive and still is to get software engineering talent and developer talents. And we think about how much have we had to increase those salaries or even our vendor costs and things like that have all gone up, and we're going and improving the products and updating the modules and features and all these things. Are we on the flip side also making sure we're getting that value-based pricing from our customers?

And a lot of times I think our portfolio companies might be hesitant to think about price increases or think about value-based pricing. But if you think about the amount of investment that we're putting in, in an ideal world, your best-fit customers are also valuing what that is and you're able to get a value-based price for it. And so we're thinking a lot more intentionally about pricing and making sure that we're not just staying flat, we're looking at what's going on in the market.

And I'd say the last piece is that no matter what, but especially during these kind of challenging times, we always still want to make sure we have the right people in the right seats. I think that's more critical than ever in an environment like this. And so we've always had a really strong focus on talent within ParkerGale. And I would just say that especially in this environment when there's a lot of uncertainty, we want to make sure that we have the right people in the right seats at the leadership level, and then that they're actually communicating and cascading that information down to the rest of the employees as well, because we want everyone to be rowing in the same direction and understanding the larger purpose.

Sean Mooney:
You brought up a number of really important points there. One, on human capital. If you were to ask me, if I go down the way back machine seven years ago, what would be the number one area that PE firms use us for, I wouldn't have said human capital. And it was in some ways a different time and there were just bigger prerogatives. It wasn't that wasn't valued or important. There was just other things that were getting more attention. And then I look at the data today in terms of all the projects come in, this last quarter, one, two, and three top use cases and value creation were all people. And it's kind of staggering. And it shows that, I think this whole idea, no matter how much the robots are being talked about, it takes people to build this.

Cici Zheng:
No matter how much ChatGPT might be giving efficiencies, yeah, we still need the right people to [inaudible 00:23:53].

Sean Mooney:
It's going to be a great productivity enhancer, but they said the internet was going to replace people, they said the iPhone was going to replace people. It just makes us more productive. At the end of the day, you need really great human beings to build these companies. So I think that's a really great, important point. The other point that you talked about is pricing. I think that as I look at all the areas that we kind of support within PE, pricing is the number one area that's underutilized, in part because it gets the most resistance from the portfolio companies, particularly from sales leadership. So how do you get the buy-in from the sales team? Because it's really scary if you're a head of sales and you say you got to raise price.

Cici Zheng:
Still working on it is the answer. But I think at the end of the day, it comes back to, if we really feel, what I said earlier, the types of companies we invest in have great products, great NPS scores, great retention scores. So if you come back to the fact that we have a solid and very, very good product, and you look at why people are buying, when we do the commercial diligence, one of the most common questions we ask is, what are your top three key purchase criteria? And they might say functionality, ease of use, customer service. Depending on the industry, it's very rare that price is the number one most important factor. And so especially when we're selling enterprise software, these are mission-critical tools and products. The customer is not looking for the cheapest one.

And so if we have this information that we know that key purchase criteria, pricing is not usually one of them. We have NPS scores and retention data that shows that we have a very solid product and a history of very solid product. And, by the way, it's not like these products are static. What are our product managers and heads of engineering and engineering talent doing? They're continuing to invest in that product. Hopefully we're able to convey this to the sales team who have to be at the front line to convey it to the customer of like these are not price increases for the sake of price increases. These are value-based pricing that justifies what we think this product actually provides to you. And if you were really looking for the cheapest price, then we wouldn't be having this conversation because that's usually not the positioning that we have.

So it takes time. I think it takes training, it takes education. And then I think it takes data because a lot of times you'd say, "Well, we're losing on price." Well, what percent of the time are we losing on price? I would argue if you're never losing on price, then you're priced too low. You should be losing a certain percentage of your deals on price. But if you can collect the data on the other side, if you're doing win-loss analysis and calls like that, then you should be able to say, "Okay, we are hearing now that we have enough actual data, not anecdata, to say we are actually losing on price too much, and so therefore we need to adjust."

Sean Mooney:
No, that's absolutely from our vantage. You got to inform, you got to educate, you got to show them the data and the why. And if you have a good customer base, a good product that values it, your customers are going to be in partnership with you as long as you don't take it too far. And there's like everything, the truth is somewhere in between the polls.

Cici Zheng:
Because the customer also knows that they're making investments in their product and it's all a chain. And so they know when prices increase or... And sometimes it's not a pure price increase. Sometimes it's different packaging, sometimes it's different bundling. So there's a lot of different ways you can pull price as a lever.

Sean Mooney:
I think that's spot on. And I'm glad you brought this up because it's a really important resource right now because of inflation that's impacting business services companies and software and technology and human capital intensive companies more than others, because it's the labor rates that are the most inflationary things that are going on right now. I think that's a great perspective, and thank you for sharing that. In terms of maybe wrapping up here, I think what I'd love to hear is I always enjoy the business that we have here because I get to work with all these great people like you and I get to learn things every day. And my whole life has been kind of like the Walmart form of innovation where I just see what other people do and custom package it in my own life. And so I always wish I could go back to my former self with all these things that I wish I knew then. What would be one of the things that you would share with yourself if you could go into the way back machine and see 22-year-old Cici?

Cici Zheng:
Yeah, so I mentioned to you I've loved writing. I've kept journals and things like that throughout my life. So I think one of the fun things about that is I can read my 16-year-old journal entries back then on something like a MySpace or [inaudible 00:28:11] or LiveJournal or something like that. And reading about all those stresses and just so much high school emo, whatever you want to call it, fears and stresses and emotions. But then I can read my 20-something-year-old journals and go back and be like, "Oh, 20-something-year-old Cici can say to teenager Cici, 'Everything will be okay.'" And then 20-something-year-old Cici's going through all these stresses that at the time feels like the biggest thing in the world. And then at this point, 30-something-year-old Cici can say to 20-something-year-old Cici, "Everything will be okay."

So hopefully, that gives me confidence that no matter what is going on right now, because at every point there's always different stresses, I hope that 10 years down the line I can continue to say to myself, looking back on it, things will be okay. I think the other thing I would say to my 22-year-old self and a piece of advice that, I'm really passionate about getting more women into private equity, more women in finance. And a piece of advice I always give to young women is, and young people in their career in general, is always take the call. And by take the call, I mean take the headhunter call. Because I think a lot of times I wasn't looking to leave my role at the time, but I took the call and then I learned something new and I was able to either compare it to what I was doing and saying, "Actually, I'm very happy where I am." And so I was deliberate and intentional about staying where I am and I feel good about that versus it's just inertia.

Or in the case of ParkerGale, I took the call. I wasn't looking to leave. But I met an amazing group of people that I've loved working with and has been so much fun. And I wouldn't have had that opportunity had I not responded to the headhunter message. And so I always say take the headhunter call because you'll learn something about a new company or how you feel about that. And one way or another, it helps you make a more informed decision about exploring something new or being intentional about your choice to stay.

Sean Mooney:
Yeah, I really like your two perspectives there. And I remember there's this great Garth Brooks song from I think the 1990s, that was some of God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers. And as I think about all the things I wanted as a kid and grew, and I was like, and then I look back, it's like, "Oh, thank God I didn't get that dream." But what a gift that you've given to your future self to be able to see that progression. And it goes back to kind of the things that we were talking about at the beginning of the podcast is like, if you have the audacity to listen to the universe, it will take you where you need to go.

And I remember that was when I was going through my whole, I'd worked my whole life to become a partner at a PE firm. And then I get to this point where I just felt like something was missing. And that was, like I had this Ratatouille moment where I was like, "Oh, I always thought I was going to be like dad and build a company one day." And then I had this idea for the company and I was going through this existential crisis, and I talked to my brother, who's the most in touch with humanity of all my siblings. I'm one of six kids. And so Tim, my brother, really kind of gets the way that humanity works versus my more linear, logical self. And he just kind of said, "Hey, if you listen to the universe, it'll tell you where to go." And my first reaction was like, "Sounds a little huggy for me."

Cici Zheng:
But it's also hard to listen to the universe, right? Because you can hear a lot of different things and you don't know what's going on in your own mind to parse through whatever lenses and things that you're listening for.

Sean Mooney:
I think that's a really good point, and I think you're a great example of how the life is a journey, not a destination. If you keep on, you end up in good places. So Cici, thank you so much for joining us today.

Cici Zheng:
Thanks so much for having me, Sean.

Sean Mooney:
Absolutely.

Cici Zheng:
It's always good to see you.

Sean Mooney:
Great to see you again in real life.

Cici Zheng:
Yes, real life. What a treat.

Sean Mooney:
Special thanks to Cici for joining. If you'd like to learn more about Cici and ParkerGale, please see the episode notes. That's all we have for today. For more information on this podcast and BluWave, go to bluwave.net/podcast. That's B-L-U-W-A-V-E. Please continue to look for us anywhere you find your favorite podcasts, including Apple, Google, and Spotify. We truly appreciate your support. If you like what you hear, please follow, review, and share. It really helps us when you do those things, so thank you in advance. In the meantime, let us know if there's anything we can do to 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.