Jonathan Booth – Private Investment Fund Manager – Booth Laird Capital Management

Jonathan Booth, Chartered Financial Analyst and CPA accredited in business valuation, joins Discover Lafayette to share his remarkable journey from being a young boy of 11 years of age falling in love with stock investments to CEO and Managing Partner of Booth Laird Capital Management, a boutique investment firm based in Lafayette.

“My uncle would buy me stock in McDonald’s…that was my birthday and Christmas present every year from all the family members instead of toys.”

Jonathan’s early exposure to investing—paired with a deep appreciation for Warren Buffett’s philosophy of buying undervalued companies with strong fundamentals—set the tone for a career defined by rigorous analysis and long-term strategy. He emphasizes patience and discipline, especially in volatile markets:

A passionate and disciplined financial strategist, Jonathan also serves on the board of FlyGuys, the Lafayette-based drone data company in which Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame recently invested $3 million in a $13 million Series A-1 funding round and led the round; O’Leary’s Wonder Fund investment will accelerate software innovation, expand global reach, and strengthen the commercial drone workforce.

A native of Baton Rouge, and graduate of Catholic High and LSU, Jonathan originally pursued accounting. “I got a scholarship from the College of Business, and I chose accounting because I already did it. After my first semester, my professor hired me to work at his private accounting practice because I did pretty well in the class. And so I just kept getting pulled along into accounting and got my bachelor’s and master’s in accounting.

Jonathan’s performance earned him a rare honor: “I passed the CPA exam in 2006 with one of the ten highest scores in the world, known as the Elijah Watt Sells Award.” He also passed all three levels of the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) exam (a minimum of three years of exams) on his first attempt.

While working at Ernst & Young, Jonathan maintained his passion for investing, ultimately founding Booth Laird Capital Management. Alongside his partner Kevin Laird, Jonathan focuses on concentrated investment strategies, targeting exceptional businesses and waiting for undervaluation. “We call them compounding machines,” he explained.

“The term ‘hedge fund’ scares a lot of people, but it’s truly just the way the fund is structured. It allows us the ability and freedom to invest more as we see fit. I prefer to call it a private investment fund. We look for companies that will compound value 10 to 20% a year on average every year. All we’re doing is finding exceptional businesses and waiting for them to be undervalued. High quality, publicly traded stocks. The great thing about these businesses is that when you do have the the pandemic or you have high inflation, their stock price might go down along with everyone else, but their business is fine while their competitors are not. So they have an opportunity to keep investing in marketing, research and development, improving their business while their competitors can’t. And they also get an opportunity to buy their competitors who are struggling because they can’t handle it. That to me means it is less risky because you’re only investing in great companies who thrive in good times, as all companies will, but they’ll do just fine in bad times as well.”

Jonathan is clear on his firm’s identity: “We’re not doing what you see on the TV show Billions…All we’re doing is finding exceptional businesses and waiting for them to be undervalued. We just wait for the opportunity to invest at a good price. Once you find these companies, because they’re so good at what they do, they have a very bright future.”

“Our clients are very happy. They come to us because they want that outsized return, but they also want someone they can trust. That’s the benefit of us versus a mutual fund. We know each one of our clients and have about 80 investors in the fund. We have one portfolio to manage. We know each one of them. We don’t talk to them all the time, we’re not financial advisors, but they know they can reach out to us at any time. And they trust that we will do well. We’re in the same thing as them. That’s the other part of it. Our fund, our money is invested right alongside theirs in the fund. We have skin in the game.”

“The great part as well about our clients is we’ve always been selective in who we’ve let into the fund. And a big part of the criteria is that they do have a long term focus, and they’re not going to panic when the market drops. So when the pandemic hit and the market was down 30 to 40%, the only emails we received were excitement that now, oh, I can’t wait to hear what we’re buying right now.”

Jonathan is also a venture investor and founder of Booth Laird Ventures, which backs early-stage companies through single-deal investment vehicles. The company has invested in several startups including FlyGuys and Muddy Water Dredge Solutions. FlyGuys, a pioneer in drone-based reality data capture, began with a $200,000 special-purpose vehicle raised by Booth and Laird’s clients. Jonathan shared a pivotal moment from July 2019: “FlyGuys is going through its growing pains, as all startups eventually do. I’d never done this before, invest my money at risk. I was not going to let that go down without a fight. So I came to Lafayette to see what we can do to fix things. And we figured out a lot in that first month, one of my favorite stories. We were probably two weeks from running out of money at the end of July 2019, and we had an investor who’d put in $100,000 about a year before, and he was mad because he saw what was going on. He thought, oh, you already lost my money. He drove all the way from Alabama just to basically yell at us and try to get his money back, which obviously wasn’t going to be possible. But by that time we had figured out a lot, and by the end of the night, he invested another $100,000. Had that not happened, I don’t know that FlyGuys would still be here.”

“The heart of FlyGuys is reality data capture, which is used primarily as an input for other people’s software. AI needs data, and we provide the data that it needs to produce a result. You need someone to actually capture the data. That’s where we came in and continue to be. We have construction progress monitoring. As an example, Buc-ee’s hired us. Every new Buc-ee’s they build in the country, we will provide construction progress monitoring, which means that throughout the course of the build, we fly over every other week, once a month and send a report where they can see the progress of the construction.”

Today, FlyGuys operates with over 16,000 FAA-certified independent contractor drone pilots in all 50 states. Booth shared, “We’re increasingly going global.”

Booth’s commitment to Lafayette is also deeply personal, as he shared that he moved here to assist FlyGuys stabilize operations back in 2019: “I’ve been here for six years. I would never go back [to Baton Rouge]. Lafayette is my home now. The people here are great, the food is great, the culture is fantastic.”

To learn more about Booth Laird Capital Management or to explore raising capital through Booth Laird Ventures, visit boothlaird.com and follow Jonathan on LinkedIn, where they blog entries are regularly posted.