PE160017
Company: Star Mountain Capital Name: Brett Hickey Email: Brett.Hickey@ StarMountainCapital.com Web: www.StarMountainCapital.com Address: Tower 57 at 135 East 57th Street, New York, NY 10022 Phone: +1 (212) 810-9044
Best SME Private Equity & Mezzanine Fund Manager - New York
Compelling Financial Returns Star Mountain Capital is a specialised lower middle-market asset management firm exclusively focused on the U.S. lower middle-market. In this engaging article, the firm’s Founder & CEO Brett A. Hickey unveils the firm’s approach to creating attractive portfolios for their investors, as well as his reflections on winning this prestigious and much deserved award.
tar Mountain invests through four complementary verticals through which it is able to garner competitive advantages and add distinctive value to the companies and the funds it invests in: (i) Direct credit investments; (ii) Direct minority and control equity investments; (iii) Strategic limited partnership investments into other lower middle-market funds and; (iv) Secondary fund investments providing liquidity to limited partners in lower middle-market funds.
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Star Mountain believes that its multi-pronged approach, while staying exclusively focused on only one marketplace, provides it with superior information, knowledge and relationships to create attractive portfolios for investors which allows for: (i) Scale; (ii) Diversification and; (iii) Large market expertise brought down into the lower middle-market.
“We are proud of our team and the great businesses and jobs we help create and look forward to continue pushing frontiers to make a positive impact for society and generate compelling financial returns for our stakeholders.” Star Mountain’s team consists of over 25 fulltime professionals and over 30 senior advisors & operating partners all of whom have highly specialised backgrounds. Including Star Mountain’s portfolio fund managers, its aligned network consists of over 125 people who focus exclusively on originating, underwriting and managing U.S. lower middle-market investments. Star Mountain offers investment products to enable institutions and high net worth individuals to access the U.S. lower middle-market. Investors are able to choose from a wide array of complementary products across both credit and equity investments including co-mingled funds and tailored separately 62 Acquisition International - December 2016
managed accounts. Within equity or credit, investors are able to further select between direct investments, fund investments and secondary fund investments which allows Star Mountain to help build optimised risk-reward and scalable product solutions for investors. Star Mountain also has a specialisation within the SBIC space where Star Mountain’s team has deep expertise including partner Harry Haskins having led the SBIC program for 15 years representing approximately 300 SBIC funds and $18 billion of capital. Star Mountain can creatively structure vehicles for its investors on a bespoke basis to maximise their objectives including yield, liquidity, diversification, geography and industry specialisation while also providing more standard structured co-mingled funds. Best SME Private Equity & Mezzanine Fund Manager - New York We are honoured to receive this award and be recognised among our peers. It feels great to see our long-term efforts paying off. We have taken an entrepreneurial approach to building a specialised business model which looks different from most other asset management firms, particularly in the lower middle-market. The ‘secret’ - we don’t think is actually any secret - it is just a matter of being thoughtful, strategic, focused, organised, aligned…and a lot of effort! For example, we all know that alignment of interest is important, and as such, 100% of our employees participate in the carried interest and all of our senior team invest material personal capital alongside our investors and own part of the management company. We also know that technology can bring substantial competitive advantages to businesses so we have an experienced full-time Chief Technology Officer and an in-house junior technology team to help realise these opportunities. Lastly, we know that we are in a ‘people business’ and we work very hard to build a highly talented team with diverse skill sets and backgrounds to execute against a highly-organised business plan which I developed in part while doing a three-year