Brad Jacobs – Masterclass on Leadership and Management (EP.368)
Feb 12, 2024
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Brad Jacobs, career CEO and founder of Jacobs Private Equity, shares his master class on leadership and management. He discusses identifying opportunities, acquiring businesses, managing talent, and motivating team members. The importance of access to capital for business plans is highlighted, along with the value of delegation, open communication, and gaining input from frontline employees.
Identifying industries for potential acquisitions: look for large, growing, fragmented industries where technology can be leveraged.
Running effective meetings: prioritize one person speaking at a time and create an environment of validation and active listening.
Importance of learning from mistakes and fostering a culture of problem-solving and reporting for personal growth and success.
Deep dives
Creating an Investment Platform
TenEast is an investment platform founded by Michael LaFell that offers access to private markets. It allows sophisticated investors to co-invest and provides exposure to various idiosyncratic investments.
Unifying Public and Private Market Data
NASDAQ Solovis is a software platform that consolidates public and private market holdings data. It allows investment teams to gain transparency and insights into performance, liquidity, and risk across their entire multi-asset class portfolio.
Leadership and Management Insights
Brad Jacobs, a career CEO and founder of Jacobs Private Equity, shares his playbook for leadership and management. He emphasizes the importance of identifying opportunities, acquiring businesses, assessing people, managing talent, running operations, and leading effective meetings.
The Roll-Up Strategy and Identifying Opportunities
Brad Jacobs discusses his roll-up strategy and how he identifies industries for potential acquisitions. He focuses on industries that are large, growing, fragmented, and where technology can be leveraged. Jacobs also emphasizes the significance of the trend towards automation and AI in industries he considers for investment.
Creating Effective Meetings
Running effective meetings is crucial for group success. The speaker emphasizes the importance of one person speaking at a time and everyone giving their full attention. This creates a powerful environment where validation and active listening are prioritized. By following these basic rules, meetings become more productive, knowledge transfer becomes effective, and the room benefits from heightened engagement and focus.
Embracing Imperfection and Learning from Mistakes
The podcast highlights the speaker's mistakes and the lessons learned from them. It is emphasized that everyone, including the speaker, is fallible and prone to making mistakes. Accepting this fact and learning from mistakes instead of striving for perfection is essential for personal growth and success. The importance of problem-solving, quick detection, and correction in a culture that encourages speaking up and reporting is also highlighted.
Brad Jacobs is a career CEO and the founder of Jacobs Private Equity (his family office). Brad created and grew three platforms using a roll-up strategy that resulted in seven multibillion-dollar publicly traded companies. He and his teams have raised $30 billion of capital, completed 500 acquisitions, created hundreds of thousands of jobs, and generated annual returns to shareholders in excess of 50%. Brad shares his playbook in his aptly named book, How to Make a Few Billion Dollars. In December, he announced a billion-dollar PIPE into a new platform opportunity, of which $900 million is his personal capital. Our conversation is a master class in all aspects of leadership and management, including identifying an opportunity, acquiring businesses, assessing people, managing talent, running operations, leading electric meetings, motivating and compensating team members, and embarking on his next platform investment.