The best returns come from businesses that mix purpose and profit and don’t compromise on either.

In this episode of Fund Flow, host Jon Finger speaks with Jake Capps, the co-founder and managing partner of Meaningful Partners, a value-based investment company focused on purposeful businesses. With over two decades of experience investing in private equity, Jake shares how he eventually came to start his own firm, what it takes to build a sustainable consumer business, and his guiding belief that purpose and profit go hand in hand.

Tune in to learn how Jake brings together purposeful businesses, aligned with an expert community, to create value for all stakeholders. 

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You are listening to Fund Flow, a podcast for emerging managers, offering insights into the journey of new and aspiring fund managers seeking to have access in a crowded market. Tune in as McGuireWoods partner and host Jon Finger is joined by guests ranging from first time fund managers to proven emerging managers, experienced LPs poised to back emerging managers and other key participants in the emerging manager ecosystem. Hear their real world perspectives and gain actionable tips to help inform your strategy and position yourself for a successful fund closing.

Welcome to Fund Flow, a McGuireWoods podcast for emerging managers. I'm Jon Finger, and today I have here with me Jake Capps, the co-founder and managing partner of Meaningful Partners. With two decades of investing experience and a passion for the consumer sector, Jake co-founded Meaningful Partners in 2016 with the knowledge of what it takes to build a sustainable consumer business and the belief that purpose and profit go hand in hand. Through investing in purposeful companies and management teams, Meaningful Partners works with select companies with an aligned vision to reach their long-term goals. Jake, thank you so much for joining us today.

Oh, it's my pleasure, Jon. Happy to be here.

I appreciate that. So let's start and if you could maybe sketch for the audience a little bit more about your career path and what led you to founding Meaningful Partners.

Yeah, look, it's been a journey and I call it just building on a talent stack from each day, month, year over now the last 25 years since I've been investing in private equity. Some folks call it falling forward, others call it spiraling upward, but one thing led to another. But going way back, I grew up in Texas with absolutely no finance background whatsoever. Learned from my parents the ethic of working hard and serving others. And so a lot of what Meaningful is really started from those kernels of my own value set. And I'll get into a little bit more on that later.

I'm tall, I'm 6'5". I played basketball, did well enough in school and that got me a chance to get up to the Northeast and ended up playing basketball at Dartmouth College, which was really transformational and perspective checking for me from a kid in the suburbs of Texas. Just opened up my mind to different people and different shared experiences from folks that grew up all over the country and all over the world.

So that was the first fall forward or spiral upward moment. I was also very entrepreneurial. I learned that from my dad. So I ran a couple of small businesses when I was playing ball at school and studying and having some fun. One of them was they're always challenger brands. I had a little moving company and the other one I had was, it kind of ticked me off that the only place you could get a Dartmouth sweatshirt or any sportswear with the name Dartmouth on it was from one place on Main Street called the Dartmouth Co-op. So I started a student athlete-ran challenger brand that was lower cost and we got all the exclusive listings at the sporting events because I knew the athletic director, and me and my other partner, who was also on the basketball team, opened up a little retail store.

So that was my first cutting my teeth in the consumer sector, made some good beer money plus, learned a lot, didn't really know what a gross margin was at that point in time, but had a nice little business that we ran. And then from there it was really a sliding dorm moment. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I was considering law school because my father was a lawyer and ended up talking to a good buddy of mine named Holden Spaht, who now is a managing partner at Thoma Bravo. And he always had a much more thoughtful vision of what he wanted to do and he had done the investment banking track during one of the summers and I asked him what that was all about. So put my hat in the ring through the corporate recruiting and did not know one bank from the next, but was told Goldman Sachs was a great culture and sought out to really go and get that job.

So ended up working in investment banking in New York for Goldman right out of college, doing corporate finance and a little M&A, and that was a great culture. It was back in the mid '90s, when the company was private. Worked really, really hard, had a very steep learning curve, but enjoyed that intellectual experience. Met some great folks that I'm still friends with to this day. And then from there, had worked on a buy-side mandate that we had for a private equity firm, and this was back before it was really institutionalized. So I went back down to my home state in Texas and got a job with a firm called Hicks Muse, which at the time managed more money than Blackstone, believe it or not. They had $10 billion under management in 1998. Went down there, I was think I was one of less than a dozen investment professionals and just had an amazing experience of being thrown in the middle of the pool without a flotation device.

Very, very large responsibility at early time in my career. And we were generalists like most of the LBO shops were back then. But I did my first consumer deal with one of our operating experts, a guy by the name of Dean Metropoulos, who's gone on to a lot of success through Pabst Blue Ribbon and more recently Hostess Twinkies, and learned and did a deal over in Europe. I bought a company called Premier Foods and that's when I fell in love with the consumer sector. I just was really intrigued by that emotive connection that draw the human being to a certain brand and carried that one forward. So after Hicks Muse, I went to another PE firm called Crestview Partners, former Goldman guys that had started that, had a great experience then and then had a chance to get back to investing exclusively in the consumer sector.

So I was poached by a firm called Lion Capital. They had spun out of the Hicks Muse European team. I had some continuity with the founding partners of that firm and worked 10 years as one of the lead partners in the US office in New York and then ended up in Los Angeles where Meaningful was founded. So there we invested in the same sectors that we do at Meaningful. We'll get into that in a little bit.

But finally, after 20 or so years found that it was time to put up or shut up and wanted to always start my own firm. I actually wrote one of my business school essays about what I'm doing now. I didn't know it at the time, but more than anything I wanted to get back to lower middle market and growth investing. We thought we had a differentiated model to put into place that we thought was very value enhancing for lower middle market and growth consumer founders, entrepreneurs and management teams. I had a lot of pattern recognition and relationships to mine upon and off we went. We started Meaningful Partners about seven years ago.

That's great. Thanks for the backdrop there, Jake. So now we have a little bit of more context around the consumer bent. I was struck in our initial meeting and I want to follow up with it a little bit more now with the strong belief that I know you and certainly your partners have in investing in purposeful companies. Could you talk about how you describe what a purposeful company is and candidly what it means to you as an investor?

Yeah, happy to do that. It's the heart and soul of our firm along with our expert community, which I think we'll get into. And I'll start with the why on this one, why having this notion of what we call purpose and profit. Number one, just like we're looking for with the companies that we invest behind, this word of authenticity is overused, but I have a strong core belief that serving others and all stakeholders and other people creates abundance. We talk a lot about that in our own home. I married my high school sweetheart, so we've been together for a long time and we have three teenage children. They live a blessed life here in Manhattan Beach and we talk a lot to them about how they got here to play beach volleyball and get the opportunity to surf.

And the shoulders on which we stand as a family really started with my parents and grandparents. My dad grew up in the hill country of Texas and I remind my children often that he did not have the opportunity to surf and play beach volleyball. He was actually in a house with no indoor plumbing. So I am a direct beneficiary of social mobility. He was the first in his family to have the opportunity to go to college and then he used that to build on his own talent stack and then pass that lap down to me. So I grew up around folks that really, really at the core were always serving other people in our community. So it was a value set that was very personal and real to me and one that I did not want to just talk about, but wanted to put into practice into the types of people that we align ourselves with.

And that's our expert community, that's our partner companies and that's everyone we come into contact with. So every decision we make really is around what can we do to serve you. And Jon, you're an exemplar of that as well, and you've done so much for not only Meaningful but the emerging market community. And I applaud you for that and I think it's probably brought a lot of abundance in your life as well. The other piece of it was I have a belief that capitalism has resulted in more positive societal outcomes over the past a hundred years than any other form of intervention, government or otherwise. That was another macro belief and actually through data and outcomes that you could actually point to. And then getting more at the specifics of your question, it was really my experience that it was good business to back companies that had a really purposeful mission, and I'll give you the exact definition of what that means to us.

And really, really that was the core of the entire employee set and entire stakeholder set. We call it servant or empathetic leadership that has a purpose I just described, baked into the DNA of the business. And if it's baked into the DNA of the business, you can't get rid of it because that's why people are buying it. So it was all those confluences that came together from a macro perspective. And then it was really from my dozen companies that I had invested in over the past 15, 20 years, it struck me from a pattern recognition perspective. The ones that had the best outcomes were those that had leaders, I think Jim Collins in Good to Great calls it level five leadership, not necessarily the most dynamic or sales oriented CEO, but the one that actually was looking after all of their stakeholders with a servant mentality.

So all of that came together from my own pattern recognition of multiple years of doing this. And then we know this, and this is through data that we have in house, it's what the customers and the consumers want. We know that businesses that have this purpose definition as we describe it, have two times higher purchase intent, two to three times higher loyalty and advocacy of a brand, and the employees working for these businesses derive three times more meaning in what they're doing than a business that does not and are more than likely to stay at that company for two times longer. So what does that result in? A better customer experience, more purchasing power, which leads to more gross margin and then hopefully higher growth. And on the employee side, lower employee turnover, which depending on the business model, whether it's multi-unit or a consumer goods business, always leads to lower operating expense and more execution to a higher level.

So we know that the best returns come from businesses, if you can find that mix of purpose and profit. So we will not compromise on either of them. And Jon, I'll probably go into a little bit more here in a minute about some of the considerations, but we have a filter where, and we've narrowed this probably since we've spoken because you can't be all things to all people, where every investment we make must qualify on the purpose side under one of three measures. The first one is health and wellbeing. We just want to be supporting in business with folks that are bringing positive societal outcomes. We have an obesity problem in this country, so we pass on deals where there's a health and wellbeing detractor as part of a business model. So that's the first filter. The second one is sustainability. We want to be driving positive environmental outcomes.

I think now more than ever is that important and our businesses, given where we are with carbon and everything else that we're faced against as a humanity. And then the third one is employee wellbeing and social mobility, which is near and dear to both me and my co-founder and partner, given what I said earlier. So each of our investments must have one of those three factors embedded into the DNA of the business. Cannot be a detractor on the other two. And most of them have two or three that are core, and that's where we focus our purposeful investing.

So without giving away too much of the secret sauce, Jake, how do you go about finding the companies that align with your values and those factors that you deem most critical to your investment decisions?

Yeah, that goes to our second real point of differentiation, which is this 47 expert community, which I know we're going to talk about, of servant leaders that have 800 plus years of experience across categories where we invest, with a whole plethora of domain expertise. So 50% of the deals that we source, over 50%, come from these expert members that are a part of our firm and they truly are the heartbeat and the soul of our business. And what that means, Jon, they all know what our filter is. They know the types of companies we like to invest behind, and they have friends, candidly, and or colleagues that are founders or CEOs of businesses that are in the consumer space that have that extra purpose measure that we're looking for.

So we get invited to meet those folks early on. Over 50% of our deal flow is truly proprietary. That's an overused word. So over 50% of our investments that we've made come proprietarily because we have trusted aligned relationships that are already warm going into them. That's the types of businesses and companies that we're looking for. And we're creating a brand. So other service providers, whether it's investment banking firms or other people in our extended network, know what we stand for. And we're starting to use that as a brand recognition calling card because there's no better reference for us than talking to somebody else that's run a company within our portfolio.

And then how do you get to the truth of it? We spend time with these folks and because we're not in a lot of processes, we get a chance to go to these offices and meet the CEOs, get into their homes and meet their families, see how they interact with their employee base. And you can't fake that. That's better than doing a reference on folks. And then in the data, we obviously parse out exactly what are those key attributes that customers are making that purchase decision based on, whether it's a B2C or a B2B business. And we got to make sure that we don't compromise and we never would on that profit side either because a sustainable business is one that can in perpetuity have better societal outcomes for all of the stakeholders that they're reaching.

So now that you've identified them, hopefully gotten to a point of making an investment if it's the right thing for both parties, can you talk about your approach to creating long-lasting, meaningful relationships with your portfolio companies and how you help them grow? Probably a good opportunity to introduce more about your expert community and their involvement, but just that post-closing ownership period. Talk to us about your approach.

Yeah, it's a great question because look, there's no better way to create long-term lasting relationships than having a one plus one equals more than two outcome, where we support our partner companies and teams and vice versa. So you got to add value; otherwise, you're just a capital provider in this day and age with very heavy competition across the private equity space. You need that more than ever. And I'll tell you more than anything else, the positive outcomes on investments are the easier ones. It's the times when the shit hits the fan that you actually figure out what your partner is really made of.

That goes both ways, both with the management team and with the private equity sponsors. So we pride ourselves on standing by our teams through the ups and downs because nothing is a straight line. The final piece we hold ourselves accountable to, and we expect the same from our management teams, is truth and transparency and no surprises at all times. So that's the good news and the bad news, we want to know about it because we don't know about it upfront. We can't activate someone from our broader community to help fix it.

I think that's the right time now to segue into our investor operator team structure, it starts with my partner Amin and co-founder Amin Maredia. He grew up actually in Houston, immigrated over from India, bootstrapped his way with his family as an entrepreneurial family to provide for their families, and then ended up working at some multi-unit consumer brands. And that brought him to Sprouts Farmer's Market, where he helped take that business from a middle market business and I think grew EBITDA from 30 million to over 350 million over his stewardship, took it public and it was a great return for his private equity backers.

He was seeking some more purpose and meaning in his life after being a public company CEO for a number of years. We started talking and we really wanted to pair my 25 years of investing experience with a group led by his expertise, and knowing the two or three things that it takes to scale a business from an operating perspective. So that's the kernel that we started on. We've since exploded that network and we have a network of folks that are 47 in number, they all have, as we call it, superpowers across categories where we invest in the consumer space with a diversity of domain expertise. They've all invested in our firm. We've also put our money where our mouth is and we've carved out a piece of carry for the group at large. Then for those that lean in on a specific investment, whether it's help with sourcing a deal, due diligence or post-investment value creation, they'll also get incremental carry equity on that specific investment where they're leaning in.

So we've got this virtuous economic relationship, but it's really stewards and servant leaders that want to help these purposeful businesses succeed and there's no money or dollar sign you can put behind that. So these are just incredible human beings, of which a third are CEO founders. And then the other two thirds come from supply chain expertise. Got a guy who ran all supply chain for General Mills over the course of a 40-year career. He's forgotten more about a manufacturing plant than most people will ever know. We've got folks that are at the tip of the spear of sales and distribution across consumer sectors. We've got folks that were buyers at the actual grocery stores or natural and food companies that we're looking to sell into. We've got folks that are social media and digital marketing gurus, other consultants and investors. And the other key hallmark is that 80% of them are working in the sectors real time.

And then the other 20% we call our modern elders that have had great careers and are looking to lean in as board directors. So that great balance of folks that are turning the toys, that are seeing the movie real time, is extraordinarily valuable; during COVID in particular really helped us inform some of our strategic initiatives, short, medium, and long-term. So longer winded way, Jon, of answering that. Before we do make an investment, we identify at least two to four things, whether it's top line sales, bottom line enhancements, more optimized marketing costs, some distribution gains that maybe the companies didn't know they had, and line up the right expert member in our network to help us go and achieve that.

So there's a lot of other things around that that we bring, but it's alignment upfront; what are the key things that you want to achieve, making sure we're aligned with that. And then what are the two or three things that we can bring as incremental oxygen to the warm fire that's already burning? With the help of our expert group to bring real incremental growth, both top line and bottom line, for these lower middle market companies, which I should have said up front, we define as 3 to 5 million of EBITDA up to the high end of 30 million of EBITDA.

And so that's super helpful as it informs your approach on the investment side. Maybe taking a little bit of a shift to the broader landscape, what are some trends? Obviously we've hopefully worked through COVID or at least to the point where we're at somewhat of a steady state. What trends are you seeing currently within these lower middle market consumer businesses as a whole?

Yeah, this is a trend that we were focused on since the inception of the firm, which is profitable growth. I think there was a leak away from that and this high growth at all cost environment, you certainly saw that at the venture capital level, we don't invest in venture binary type outcomes, but there were lots of businesses being lauded and raising capital based on revenue multiples with, in our opinion, lots of times nowhere a near term approach to being profitable.

So there's been a massive pendulum shift over the last 12 months to profitably growing businesses. And those that economically just aren't set up for it depending on the category, and we know what the gross margin top quartile benchmark looks like in every category that we invest. And if you can't have line of sight to that, we know there's pretty much a flaw in that business model and it won't be a sustainable business that we'd be willing to put our character of capital behind.

So we spent a lot of time, and this hasn't changed during the go-go environment of the last few years going in and coming out of COVID, but I will tell you that the businesses that we're looking at, there's a lot of down rounds out there for businesses that were spending too much acquisition online that doubled in terms of how much it cost year over year, that didn't have the in-house capability to execute and sell into different channels. And if they don't have that diversity, and again, this is specific to idiosyncratic to different categories depending on their gross margin, but we are seeing a pullback from investment capital willing to take higher risk for higher growth companies that don't have bottom line profitability.

The other thing we're seeing is still significant growth in the businesses that will have anywhere from 15 million in revenue to 100 million in revenue, unlike other very large consumer companies, and I used to invest in that ilk where the macro plus or minus in terms of consumer trends really matters. Two thirds of consumer growth is coming from smaller businesses and challenger businesses, as opposed to the more large scale CPG companies. So we've got businesses in our portfolio that have meaningful distribution opportunities in white space, where it's a more relevant consumer proposition than the incumbent that might not be as good for you or taste as good for you, where we're taking share from those folks.

So not only do we have white space in terms of distribution, we're also getting more shelf space, and that's more at the food and beverage and the beauty categories where we're looking. So we're really, really excited about that prospect, especially as we're seeing valuations starting to come in a little bit relative to where they've been in the past driven by both public markets and private market comps. So I'd say those are some of the key callouts.

That's great. Maybe as you think about certain segments within the broader consumer strategy, are there particular segments that you believe lend themselves more towards being a purposeful business?

Not really. It's not sector specific for what I said earlier, Jon, because it comes from within, right? It comes from the founding DNA. And I could give you an example with every one of our partner companies. AndPizza is a multi-unit, fast casual pizza business that was started on a notion that you could actually pay frontline employees a living wage. And yes, he had to make some compromises on cost elsewhere to make sure he had great box economics, but at the end of the day, he was giving the customer a consumer proposition where folks, to what I said earlier, derived meaning from working there and yet a better customer experience, a higher willingness to pay a higher gross margin and better cash on cash returns.

I think it's much more idiosyncratic to the founding DNA of "a purposeful business" as we see it. And it really does cascade across sectors, whether it's beauty and personal care, food and beverage, there's a lot of founding stories of trying to cure their own health issue, and that's why the business has started. So it really isn't company or sector specific, and that's the beauty in our expert community because we get warm leads to folks that have obviously consumer led strategy paired with a authentic DNA of a purposeful business, where we see in the data that they are selling more of their products or services and able to take share from the incumbents.

So one of the other areas within the current environment, I thought we could speak a little bit about in light of your approach. Over the years, it does seem as though there was significant focus on ESG, almost a predominant focus. While that hasn't gone away, I do think it has subsided a bit. Even more recently, I know this affects bigger businesses as a general matter than ones you're looking at, but the intersection and interplay between unions and companies right now certainly has taken a turn. What are some of the opportunities that you see in the current market for investors looking to align purpose and profit in their investments?

Yeah, look, at the tip of the spear for us is that A, it's the right thing to do and we lead with purpose. And so we're always looking at the holistic picture of ESG paired with your stakeholder group because we know through the data that brings better financial outcomes for that company. So for us, we don't think it's just a good thing to do and nice for the world. We also think it's table stakes to run a business, especially in an environment where there is a generational shift in wealth transference down to the millennials and Gen Z, and underneath that, where we see that in the data even more so a desire to align their purchase and their wallet behind purposeful business. So where we play in the consumer sector, we think it would be the wrong thing to do and bad business not to align in it.

And there's always gray areas. We are not perfect. We actually are using a third party firm to help us quantify the key performance indicators on that purpose side of our house. And over a long period of time, we are hopeful to be able to show if you are a purposeful business as we define it, you do have better outcomes. We've only been investing over the last five, six years in this form. So there's more to come on that. We're in the second inning, Jon, of what I would consider purposeful stakeholder led investments, although that at the core of the onset of capitalism is what it stood for.

So for me, it's just getting away from this rhetoric of the barbells and really finding the balance and the middle ground, making the right trade-offs on purpose and profit because there always are trade-offs and nobody's perfect in life. But knowing what you stand for, who you are and making sure you always stay true to that, and then that's going to build a growing, viable lasting business, whether it's a consumer facing brand or a B2B business and you're dealing with other companies that you're selling into.

That's great. So Jake, with the podcast being around emerging managers, I wanted to spend some time, you and the team obviously have had some wonderful success in a challenging fundraising environment. Based on your experiences to date, what are the biggest challenges you found and you think emerging managers face today?

Yeah, look, I laugh, Jon, that I've been doing this for 25 years. I turned 50 last week and I'm still considered an emerging manager. So one is it's just, and I've got colleagues that are much younger than I am leading bigger firms, but for us it's know who you are, know what your supers are, and then build complimentary skillset around you. And I did that with my partner Amin. He knows how to scale a business. That is not a superpower that I had honed over my 25-year career. We've got incredible team day-to-day at Meaningful Partners. And if you asked me what I'm most proud of, it would be that. What's good for the goose is good for the gander. They are purposeful folks. If you talk to them, I hope they'd say that they derive meaning in what we're doing. We're able to hire better and can't on a cash comp basis afford what some of the larger firms are paying.

We give all of our senior execs and junior execs carry in our firm. So we think we're being generous and doing the right thing because taking a compromise on cash comp. But we've got people that are aligned that are thoughtful, that have experience in the consumer sector and believe in what we're up to. So I'd say build a team around it. Know what you're good at, whatever your thesis or strategy is, build a repeatable replicable model around that that is real and defensible. Have resilience, same thing we ask of our founders. Reflect on what you did wrong on past deals or in current deals; that's more powerful and we do that twice a year. What did we miss on? Why is a business underperforming? What would we change? What should we do differently? So always constantly evolving and using what we call our 800 years of scar tissue to inform in better decision-making and keep iterating.

And the other one is don't have thesis or strategy creep. We think our strategy works. Sub 500 million of capital raised, I'll be damned if we go in a better environment. I'll get to the biggest headwind right now, which most folks know, which is fundraising. But we know what we're good at and we need to earn that right, because trust is only earned through time and performance period full stop. So I guess patience would be another one, but make sure you stick to your knitting and know what you're good at, what's going to bring outsized alpha and outcomes. And then the biggest headwind right now is we're in a very challenged fundraising and market. I've been through the dotcom bust, obviously through the '08 great financial recession. And this is even worse because it's just a supply demand imbalance with venture capital getting cut in half in terms of valuations.

And so there's the denominator effect that we're all matched with. And LPs are really limited with the time that they can spend. So whether it's a co-invest deal or a new fund investment, they're really, really thin on time. So you really need to go out and develop those trusted relationships because it comes with time and performance. And I'll leave with a little mantra that I had when we raised our first capital vehicle, which was SW squared plus WC equals MO. Some will care, some won't. Who cares? Move on. And that was a swing thought that I used because I went out to hundreds and hundreds of investors to get my great group of LPs that really believe in what we're doing in support of us through funds one and funds two. So those are some swing thoughts for emerging managers.

No, that's great. It's one of the most often cited themes, is learning how to get comfortable with rejection. I think that you touched on some of the same principle there. One last question, Jake. As you think about investing in consumer businesses, and this doesn't necessarily have to be advice to emerging managers or candidly any GP or strategic, what is the biggest piece of advice you would give to people looking to invest in consumer businesses?

That's a big question. There's a lot that goes into investing in any category. The consumer sector, like most, but it's the one that I happen to have all of my experience in, I say it's like a shark. It's in constant motion. So we do care a lot about having real time pattern recognition and complimentary expertise through our expert network. And we've really put in a institutionalized way that we reach out to the right experts that can give us that expertise in any given moment. So we're balanced and we don't overindex at any period of time and make sure we learn from all that scar tissue. But more than anything in consumer right now, it's making sure that it's a team that can execute on the strategy, that has an economic profile and a gross margin that can stand the test of time.

I always say gross margin doesn't lie. It is a proxy for pricing power. So it begins there on that financial profit side of our investment diligence. So make sure you've got a business that really is sustainable and you can stand up a team to invest in that business, whether it's a B2B or product or service brand over time. And then the alignment upfront, I think I talked a little bit about it with that management team, because you're going to go through, I said that the numbers will lie. We torture the numbers and they'll confess to anything. So eventually there's going to be something that's not right on spec with our five-year forecast.

And that's the true measure of the sponsor, was how do you react to that? Are you a value added partner? Can you make the tough decisions early enough along? Do you have the trust and credibility built with that team that they're going to listen to you and they're going to do it? Because it's not easy to run a business and I know that firsthand now. So it's a confluence of things as always, but those are a few things that I'd call out.

Thank you, Jake. Well, Jake, I really do want to sincerely thank you for joining me today on Fund Flow, sharing your insights with the emerging manager community, and thank you to our listeners for joining us on this latest episode of Fund Flow. We hope you join us next time.

Thank you for joining us on this episode of Fund Flow. To learn more about today's discussion, please email host Jon Finger at jfinger@mcguirewoods.com. We look forward to hearing from you.

This series was recorded and is being made available by McGuireWoods for informational purposes only. By accessing this series, you acknowledge that McGuireWoods makes no warranty, guarantee or representation as to the accuracy or sufficiency of the information featured in this installment. The views, information, or opinions expressed are solely those of the individuals involved and do not necessarily reflect those of McGuireWoods. This series should not be used as a substitute for competent legal advice from a licensed professional attorney in your state and should not be construed as an offer to make or consider any investment or course of action.