Ep. 67 Lauren Mulholland, Founding Partner, MiddleGround Capital
Same mission; broader horizons.
“Out of all of the things that we have accomplished in the last three and a half years, the #1 thing that we are the most excited about is the team.”
MiddleGround Capital is a private equity firm with offices in both Lexington, KY, and New York City. After successfully raising a $460M Fund I, MiddleGround Capital has grown their portfolio to include 7 platform companies, $1.8B AUM, and 50+ employees—growth faster than even the MGC team predicted. Founding Partner Lauren Mulholland sits down with Jordan Selleck on this episode of Investors & Operators to discuss:
the insanely fast growth of MiddleGround and the importance of being flexible
how Fund I has shaped them for raising Fund II
MGC’s ‘Women's Wing’ program & the importance of female empowerment
and much more.
Full episode at the bottom of this page.
Flexibility is key.
After launching MiddleGround Capital in 2018, Lauren Mulholland learned a major lesson: flexibility is the key to success. As entrepreneurs who went months without a paycheck to pursue their dreams, the founding team of MiddleGround Capital utilized flexibility to grow the firm to 45 people, 10+ transactions, and a Fund II of $1B+.
With no professional turnover for three and a half years, effectively training their employees is at the forefront of MiddleGround’s mind. Bringing in different perspectives and diversity for the team leads to massive improvements to the culture and operations of the firm.
“Improving on our training process is a huge focus,” says Lauren. “Out of all of the things that we have accomplished in the last three and a half years, the #1 thing that we are the most excited about is the team.”
This passion for team and team building is really based on transparency around fundraising, portfolio ops, BD, and more--a value key to MiddleGround Capital
Proactivity for Fund II
MiddleGround Capital stays strongly committed to thesis-based investing. Lauren says that being relentlessly devoted to this thesis has actually led to more opportunities—even if it means they pass on opportunities more frequently.
“Because we’ve been having a lot of conversations with banks around our thesis and educating the market place where we want to invest, we were getting access to better deal flow, getting access to more limited processes, where some of the banks would think of us as a strategic or a highly interested sponsor versus just a generalist sponsor.”
Being “flexible” was another major reason for the success in 2020. They were able to work through distress situations, and had flexibility when coming to the willingness to do deals and deal structure.
Living in your power
It’s important to Lauren to have a place for female empowerment in the workplace. Created during Women’s History Month in March, ‘Women’s Wing’ was created to bring external parties into their world to help women with mental health, work life balance, financial responsibility, building confidence, and more.
This group has become a staple of the workplace at MGC, encouraging the women in the office to live fully in their power. Not only are portfolios, firms, and returns positively impacted by the empowerment of this group of women, but the communities in which they live and operate are as well. True success at the firm level relies on success at the personal level--and Lauren holds this in high regard.
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Jordan Selleck
On this episode of investors and operators. We sit down for part two with Lauren Mulholland, founding partner at MiddleGround Capital. So it has been a couple years and we have a lot to cover. So in this episode, we're going to be covering Fund I lessons, Fund II update, hiring, ESG, key lessons from 2020. And COVID because you did deals. You did what? Six...
Lauren Mulholland
Six deals last year. Yeah. Six.
Jordan Selleck
Six deals during COVID. And we'll wrap up with initiatives with women in the industry and what MiddleGround and what Lauren is doing. So, all right. Fund I, actually, this is kind of the high level update--kind of facts and figures about MiddleGround today. Started in 2018. What's the update on MiddleGround?
Lauren Mulholland
Okay. Well, we've got a lot to update you on. As you know, we started the firm in 2018. Since then we've grown from three people who started the business to now over 45 people. And as you know, that's across two different locations. And so we've been managing that cultural shift as we've been growing both of those teams. We've also deployed a lot of capital. We've done 10 transactions in this period of time, six of which were done last year we've got seven portfolio companies and then we've completed three ad-ons and our pipeline is really strong right now. It's a very crazy M&A market, which I think everybody is aware of. But that's very exciting and that's also helped us to raise Fund II. We are very close to having final closes on just about a billion dollars of capital. Actually ended up being a little bit over a billion dollars of capital, which is pretty crazy to think about it when years ago, we didn't even have any income.
Jordan Selleck
So how many months did you go? How many months did you go without any income?
Lauren Mulholland
It was at least six months. Yeah.
Jordan Selleck
Yep, yep. Oh, fun times in entrepreneurship.
Lauren Mulholland
When you have two young kids at home and a husband being like, why did you do that again?
Jordan Selleck
Yes. so today is different though. So Fund II and over 45 people, 50 people. Did you say over 45, 2 offices between New York and Kentucky seven platforms we're in now the third iteration of an office in New York. And the
Lauren Mulholland
Substantial portion of my time is that growing from a multiple offices into where we, well,
Jordan Selleck
Let's talk about growing in and just kind of higher needs. What, what positions are you hiring for you know, in the next couple of months or currently?
Lauren Mulholland
Yeah, well, I think one of the lessons that we've learned over the last three years, but importantly in 2020 is having a diversity of, of deal sources and where it's coming in from. I mean, there are over a thousand intermediaries that we could be calling on at any given time, not to mention, you know, proactive outreach to targets that we want to be acquiring. And so, as we are looking to start deploying our second fund and, and raising, you know, fund subsequent series of funds, we really need to be expanding our sourcing team to make sure that we're seeing all of the the available opportunities out there. So we will be making a few hires around that. We will also be expanding our operations team. There's with an increasing portfolio, we had a need more people at the VP level that oversees the project management for the initiatives that we underwrite during our deals.
Jordan Selleck
Typical background for that on the operation side. You know, I remember, I think, you know, one of the recent team members came, they're like a engineer at Toyota. Are you looking for people who come from industry or come from like, you know, consulting background, what kind of people you're looking for?
Lauren Mulholland
We're typically looking for people who have an industry background. And we look for people where that industry background aligns with the businesses that we're investing in. So it's usually some type of manufacturing business or some type of industrial B2B business, but it depends on the role. We have, you know, VPs of operations where it's more project management role and they have responsibility for portfolio companies. And then we have sort of tactical people who have a very specific background and skillset. You know, we have one individual on our team who's solely responsible for managing all the equipment and all the cap forecasts all of our business because that's what his background is right now. We just recently posted on LinkedIn, a position for somebody to help us run all of the sales and support our sales teams at all of our portfolio companies.
Jordan Selleck
So that's like a senior salesperson who has experienced in industrials B2B, and just really understands from a senior perspective, sales and marketing.
Lauren Mulholland
Yeah. And like H what incentives we can put in place for our teams, what tools, what processes, what systems we can put in place for our teams, what data we need to be tracking, the progress that those sales teams are making. It's something we're really excited about because it's, it's, you know, a growth mindset that our ops team will be bringing to our portfolio companies.
Jordan Selleck
On the, on the BD side, are you looking for like any type of BD talent, you know, junior mid-level or it's a
Lauren Mulholland
Good question. We actually are looking for two different types of people. We're looking for one person who can work with our existing team to be kind of outward facing and to be going out and really soliciting deals. And then we're looking for one person who's more analytics focused and who can go through target list and who can scrub through data and who can be responsible for making sure deal cloud, which is our CRM system is the best that it can be. So it's, it's two completely different skillsets, but very important to, to round out our team
Jordan Selleck
On the internal or analytics side. Are you, are you looking for somebody who does come from an analytics background, you know, maybe they did data science at a junior level, for example, or what are you kind of looking
Lauren Mulholland
For? You know, I think it could be somebody that has an analytical background. It could also just be somebody who has a transaction background and wants to do something different, but definitely some level of analytical and research oriented background.
Jordan Selleck
Okay. Okay. Let's rewind to Fund I. And we did a video maybe a little bit over a year ago on kind of key lessons from the Fund I res, but I think it's interesting now that you've done fun too. There's that added time to really have to look back on Fund I and the maturity of being out at fun too. What are some of the key lessons for emerging managers who maybe they're considering a Fund I, maybe they are just kicking off or they're in the middle of it, you know, looking back, what do you see as some of the key takeaways from, you know, your successful raise and maybe things that you would advise to do differently?
Lauren Mulholland
I think one thing that we did really well was put a strategy in place and communicate that strategy and vision to the investor marketplace. First of all, we were very thoughtful about where we wanted to go over, you know, a 10 year period of time. And we not only kind of modeled out how the team would be growing over that period of time, but also like what it meant for us as partners. And so that meant that investors didn't have any questions that we had already kind of thought through some of the questions that investors were asking us. But I think most importantly, what was helpful about this is we're now, you know, three and a half years in, and we can point to our original strategy and we can say we executed against everything that we had in our strategy. We might've done it faster than expected, but we, we S we stayed in line with our strategy and true to what we told you we were going to do. And that's just fundamentally what we try to do. We try to do what we say we're going to do. And so being proactive about communicating that vision to the marketplace and then actually executing on it has really helped us a lot as we've embarked on Fund II and beyond. So I think that was very helpful. To that point, I think staying laser focused on investing in businesses that really do line up with your strategy and with your value, add to the marketplace is the second most important thing that we've done.
Jordan Selleck
Do you feel tempted at times? And it's like, God, we just need to get a deal done.
Lauren Mulholland
Okay, mean, we get deals in all the time that we're like, oh, maybe we could do that deal. Or, you know, maybe we could do this deal. But one of the most important things we do is screen through very large funnel and narrow it down to really what lines up with our investment thesis. And so it's understanding how each of the companies that we look at line up against our metrics are, you know, how they are, how we can them against thresholds that we have and how they answer a thesis questions for us. And it's really important for us to be able to identify and quantify a value creation plan for our operations team, because part of our value add is deploying them to our portfolio company so that they can drive value at those portfolio companies. And if we can't identify that, that deal's not for us, even if it's a great deal. So we do get tempted to look at those deals all the time, because there are obviously merits to a lot of deals that just simply don't line up for us. And as we've been in the market, now we can point to, you know, the specific value add that our team is bringing for every single one of the deals in our portfolio company. And they all line up very well with our strategy. So it's, it's what people expected to see from us. And it's what we've executed
Jordan Selleck
On the, on the first part of the strategy. I mean, it was kind of like the next level of depth around that, because it sounds like, you know, everyone understand, like have a clear strategy stick to it, but what is like, like how can we dimensionalize that are impacted a little bit more?
Lauren Mulholland
Well, I think like actually what happened through COVID in 2020 is a good example. You know, we had made four investments going into COVID. All four of those investments, we followed our typical strategy and our strategy, especially from an operations perspective is to focus first on like low-hanging fruit initiatives, specifically with respect to networking capital, where we can generate cash upfront. And the reason that we do that is it helps us to deliver our businesses, right. And then once we've done that and we've changed the cash conversion cycle, then we moved to implementing initiatives from an EBITDA enhancement perspective that drive long-term EBITDA improvement. And so when we hit COVID, we had already executed against de-levering initiatives, you know, whether it's working with customers to improve our collection days, whether it's working with vendors to extend them out, whether it's putting certain plans in place with vendors to have payment plans. And then whether it's rationalizing and right-sizing the inventory base of the company, you know, those things generate cash up front and allow us to pay down debt and put us out for those portfolios. Nobody's in a good position when COVID happened. And we we were able to withstand that because we had already repaid a lot of debt.
Jordan Selleck
One, one on, what do you think are some, you know, maybe some missteps during that. I mean, everything was going fast and successful, but like, what were some things that maybe you would do you would advise to do differently or just kind of be more conscious of?
Lauren Mulholland
I think the biggest thing that I would have done differently is we have grown so much and we brought on so many resources that I think we did that while having good training in place, but not great training in place. And so I think making sure that we had the resources internally dedicated to training upfront would have really kind of helped our organization to potentially even achieve more than we have. And it's a really big focus of where we are today is working with our new people. And we've made a very specific decision to hire people from all backgrounds. And there there's a lot of great things about that because it brings different perspectives. It adds diversity, and it just, you know, overall I think helps to create a different type of culture than what you see at other private equity firms. But if that model is going to be successful, we have to be dedicating our resources internally to training them. And especially where we are in the M&A market cycle right now, our resources for training are also trying to get deals done. And so you know, I think improving on our trading processes is a huge,
Jordan Selleck
It's interesting because with all the operational expertise that the team has, do you feel like that was just more outwardly focused? Like, Hey, we really know how to, when we buy a business, you know, operational improvements, but it was just so focused outwardly and our plan, like similar skillsets internally, or just the mental bandwidth and commitment to the mission.
Lauren Mulholland
I think it's just simply that we grew so fast across every single team, but, you know, I think it's, it's we refer to it you know, as growing pains, you know, so but we're, I think out of all of the things that we have accomplished in the last three and a half years, the number one thing that we are the most excited about is actually the team. We haven't had any professional turnover at the whole firm in three and a half years. And I think that says a lot. And so, you know, that's something that all three of us are really proud of, but that doesn't mean that we're perfect and there are definitely improvements that need to be made and we're making those improvements
Jordan Selleck
Going over to fund II. You know, how was Fund II, that experience different from Fund I, in terms of more than like the, if you want to talk about the fundraising side or on the operational side or whatever direction you think main are interesting.
Lauren Mulholland
The one we were selling an idea and a strategy and a vision and three people, you know, I think one of the things that we did well is we built out our team, but what we did in Fund II, we brought a lot of our team members into the fundraising process. I mean, it's not common that associates get access to LPs during a fundraising, not
Jordan Selleck
Common that partners are like certain partners in certain firms, like are included in and even know the LPs are, have as suppose, like you have these 10 words that you're saying, and then we're at the table.
Lauren Mulholland
We just, we're very transparent with our investors. And we're very transparent with our people that work at our firm. And so that's, and we also think that our people are some of our biggest assets. And so we were very working with our teams to present, you know, case studies on all of the portfolio companies that we own today, walking through, you know, what we underwrote in our plan and how we're performing against that plan. And that was presented to our LPs by associates, by senior associates, by VPs. And so I think that, that that has been something that's been well received.
Jordan Selleck
All right. ESG. So, you know, everywhere in your branding now that you can't not see PRI, and can you just kinda, you know, unpackage, what does that practically mean at the fund level? What does that practically mean at the portfolio company level? I think it gets a lot of lip service with ESG and people talk about it, but I'm curious to them, like, what does it actually mean and how you operate the business?
Lauren Mulholland
So, first of all, you probably noticed that our logo, which is a, used to be a blue fish for the Greer is now earth green.
Jordan Selleck
That was John's idea. So that doesn't surprise you.
Lauren Mulholland
But our logo is now earth green for the year, for just for this year. It's sort of a commemorative logo if you will, for 2021. Because that is a really big emphasis of ours this year. And so we actually established a task force internally across the back office, the operations team and the investment team. And we pull people together from all those teams and said, we want to be best in class, as it relates to our ESG reporting and analysis, what should we be doing for this? And so that team actually brought the PRI to us. And as part of that, we decided to move forward with the the application to, to join and commit to their principals. And so we're going through all of the requirements and reporting that is required for that over the course of this year. And I made some good progress on that, but more tactically internally, how we actually handle and evaluate ESG is really twofold.
Lauren Mulholland
First, it does play into our underwriting. And then second, it plays out across our portfolio company where retract portfolio companies, where we're tracking this information. And so, you know, one example, we closed the deal in December of last year, where there were a few things that we wanted to be investing in the business so that we could improve the ESG statistics of them. You know, one thing, very simple as like improving some of the safety protocols that they have, making sure that everybody has the appropriate PPE to wear around the plant, putting in the appropriate barriers to make sure that people weren't going in certain locations. So just setting aside a budget for that is a very small thing that we did. We also set aside and underwrote that all of the employees that were being paid below $15 an hour, we're actually getting increases in their wages until the point where they were making $15 an hour. And that's something that we've committed to across our entire portfolio which is a, such a substantial investment in our portfolio companies. And then we also underwrote material like multimillion dollar investment in improving the company's facilities for both environmental purposes for the actual environment, but also for our employees. And also just, you know more appropriate structural environment for those people. Do, do
Jordan Selleck
You think it feels tangibly different now the application of ESG to the portfolio then not just with MiddleGround, but maybe in the industry now versus like three years ago? Absolutely. Yes, I do. So private equity is doing,
Lauren Mulholland
Many people in private equity are doing very well and they're, they're taking it seriously and it's not probably not everybody, but I, we discuss it all the time with our investors. And that's really where it needs to start at the investors need to be requiring their GPS to be, you know, putting these practices and these policies in place. Have you seen that with LPs,
Jordan Selleck
Just like generally speaking with LPs or what your conversation with other firms that are raising? So like, yeah, the LPs are actually, this is, this is not ad hoc. It's not inconsistent. It is part of every discussion
Lauren Mulholland
Of every discussion and, you know, I'm having other partners at other private equity firms reach out to me asking, you know, what do we do? And we're more than happy to share that with anybody. These are not, this is not to us, you know, an internal, competitive advantage thing. This is something that everybody should be doing and it should be best practice. But we also, at the portfolio company level, we've installed it instituted a tracking mechanism called tablecloth, which is a software that all of our portfolio companies have installed that tracks all of the data across certain metrics for all E S and G data points that we want to be.
Jordan Selleck
Well, it's interesting because, you know, when you speak about transparency, I remember last year when we were having the, a webinar and John was on the panel, like he screen shared the statistics and it's, might've made some people cringe on him. There was like a MiddleGround. I was a compliant, but it was like, but that is absolutely on brand for you are transparent and you're trying to make the industry better. Yeah. And I think it's, it's really indicative of a mentality of transparency
Lauren Mulholland
And it's playing into our ideals too. And we wanna continue to be doing deals where there's a specific ESG story where we can be improving the company on those metrics. And maybe there's even an added benefit for like a tallest deal that we acquired in December where the product itself is an ESG story. I mean, they're supplying solar I-beams, which are steel foundations for the solar industry helping to improve the environment. So that's an added benefit on top of what we are actually investing in the company to improve their ESG. Okay.
Jordan Selleck
That's really cool. Those are really good specific examples. I think that the industry does have it front of mine and it's, it's I think, important for the public to see that absolutely. Because, you know, private equity headlines are not always consistent with reality.
Lauren Mulholland
Right? Absolutely. I think that's a big problem for our industry. Absolutely. We get a really bad rap overall. But I think there's a lot of people doing good things.
Jordan Selleck
Let's think about kind of the key lessons from 2020, and now you bought six businesses. So not just actually on the acquisition front, but let's just kind of think along maybe three parts. What are some of the key lessons from 2020 and during the pandemic from a sourcing perspective acquisition, you did six deals and maybe from an operational perspective that you're going to use going forward. Yeah,
Lauren Mulholland
Well, I think one of the biggest things that actually really helped us in 2020 was in 2019, we started to develop some industry thesis and to do some more thesis driven investing, which is we're looking for businesses that line up with our strategy and everything that we you know, are looking for for our, within our main fund. But we're also looking on top of that for a couple of businesses to have exposure to certain trends across the mobility landscape and the infrastructure landscape. And right now we're in the process of developing a thesis around industry 4.0. And so having those theses already prepared meant that we had done work to know what sectors and what areas within those industries. We wanted to be investing in what we wanted to look for. It also, because we'd been having lots of conversations with banks around our thesis, and we'd been educating the marketplace on where we wanted to invest, we were getting access to better deal flow. We were getting access to more limited processes where some of the banks would think of us, you know, as more of like a, a strategic or a highly interested sponsor versus just a generalist sponsor. And when you think about the deals we did in 2020 of the six deals, four of them were aligned with our mobility and infrastructure thesis. Yeah.
Jordan Selleck
Yeah. I keep on going. So where does some of the other key lessons either from sourcing or transactions or operations? Yeah. Yeah.
Lauren Mulholland
So I think in addition to the building out theses, I think another lesson that we learned was you have to be flexible. You know, when we first started the fund, we did not anticipate being active in 360 3 processes. We had that skillset from working at our prior firm, but it wasn't what we wanted to do when we started MiddleGround. We, we are trying to buy good businesses and making them great businesses, and we are still doing that. But what happened during COVID is a number of businesses went through bankruptcy processes because of a bad balance sheet and because of too much leverage. And so we were able to work through a couple of more distressed situations and, and specific to the process itself that, you know, we had to be proactive. We had to be proactive and flexible. Do
Jordan Selleck
You now apply that lesson into your investment thesis and then, okay, what's the real big, what's the word, the meaning of worst case now it just got know redefined. Is it, do you think about that as you're going through the transaction process and not just modeling, but more conceptually, what are the, what's the worst case scenario? We
Lauren Mulholland
Are always looking at downside protection and even more so in a case like that, where, you know, the, the transaction process in and of itself is more complex and there have been, you know there is a history of bankruptcies, so we will, it, it, it does definitely rise to the surface even more than it already does, but it also vastly plays into, you know, the valuation and the purchase price and the structure that we're considering for those sellers. And we've had to also, you know, we, we had to be not only flexible around our willingness to do those deals, but also much more flexible around the structures with which we're doing those deals in, they're not plain vanilla deals, they have more complex structures, and that allows us to be more creative. And that also brings another like toolkit that we can apply to new deals down the road that we would not have had had we just been doing, you know, good to great traditional elbows. So I think bringing that skillset to bear in 2020, it was very important. How
Jordan Selleck
Do you think that you've changed in the past, you know, since 2018 from maybe like a skillset perspective of, you know, managing the business, starting a business with John and Scott you know, just how, how do you think that you've evolved in the past few years?
Lauren Mulholland
I mean, a lot. I think there's a lot of things that I work on. I have, I have an executive coach who kind of helps me with you know, everything like from how do I manage my team to, how do I sell a vision to how, you know, how, how am I feeling at any given day? You know, there's a lot of things that, that come into it, but, you know, my entire career has been predominantly around execution. And when you move from execution into not only management, but also leadership there it's completely different skillsets. And so I've been picking them up along the way, but I've also been able to work with an executive coach. Who's helped me with that. How long has it been working with a coach for nine months now? And then I also in may completed like a week long session with a center for creative and did an on the ground training with them, which worked through, you know, a number of leadership topics. And I think I learned a lot of things coming out of that, but the first is sort of what my superpowers are based on 360 degree feedback from everybody. And so I'm like learning how to really lean into those superpowers and become known for those things. And then also what my developmental areas are and you know, what steps I can be taking to get better at those.
Jordan Selleck
Well, that's leaving in the next question, which is what your superpowers
Lauren Mulholland
Learning agility is one of them like always wanting to learn new things and pick up things quickly. Communication is, is one of those things. And then also the ability to impact and have influence internally. Those are the three things that came out of my 360.
Jordan Selleck
What do you think came out of it where you felt like, Hey, I needed to do this, but in reality, it's either somebody else needs to do that. Or it's just like, I'm never going to be good at that. [inaudible]
Lauren Mulholland
Try to hire people where I'm not so good at things, right? Like that's where those are the compliments that you're looking to find. And that's a conversation that I have with my coach. You know, these are your three superpowers. Here are your three development areas. You don't need to go from like a Sea-Doo and a, you need to go from like a C to a C plus or a B minus.
Jordan Selleck
That's really cool. Yeah, I, I, I just hired a coach not for executive OSHA, but more like a for triathlon. And I'm like, I've had a coach for 15 years. And just, even in the dynamics of those discussions, it made me think about, you know, so much stuff. I'm not even even considering about my own development. So like maybe I should get an executive coach. There's someone who I worked with for a year who was the former head of strength and conditioning for the Yankees, Dana cavalier. And just especially last year when in it was difficult and with a small business and he just he's like, Jordan, you can just make the pizza, make the focus on making the pizza. I was like, is this what you do for a living? And he's like, he's like, why are you over-complicating, I don't need to give you a PowerPoint on where you needed to develop. He's like, we need to focus on the most simplest, simple things, get those right. And then we can start. And it was like, I couldn't see that part about myself unless I had his outside perspective. Yeah. So over to next topic, which is women's wing. Yes. All right, cool. I saw the post. I just want to make sure I'm not answering what it's called. So what is women's wing? So
Lauren Mulholland
We started the women's wing internally during women's history month in March, and the we've grown very quickly as I mentioned. And so, as part of that, we've hired a lot of women at the time. It was 17. I think we're closer to 20 now, but we want to create a space for the women to get together and build relationships and bond, but also want to bring third parties and external people into our world and help to tell us about, you know, whatever it is that they do. So we've got a series of areas that we want to be spending more time on, you know, that we think are important for women, whether it's mental health, whether it's work-life balance, whether it's having responsibility for your finances, whether it's building confidence, whether it's public speaking, whether it's negotiating for yourself whether it's even just like preliminary or moderate or advanced leadership skills. So we've wrote down sort of all these topics. We've got feedback from all the women in the organization around what topics they want to hear about. And then we tried to find either a group of people internally or people externally who could come in and speak on these topics. And so we've done a few so far. We've had people from LFS come in to talk about the importance of owning your own finances and of women really knowing their place as it relates to money, because some people are very uncomfortable with their own money. We've had, we did one on a woman in our organization is actually a dance fitness instructor. And so she led a class for us where a bunch of us were in Kentucky. And so we all got together at a studio and did a big class together. And that was a lot of fun. And we zoomed in the team from New York. We had Lydia Fernet come in. She is the head of auctioning at Christie's. And she also wrote a book called the most powerful woman in the room is you. And she came in a couple of weeks ago and her message is really just one of female empowerment. But, you know, there's just a lot of important themes that are driven home to women about, you know, entering a room and knowing exactly what you're going to say when you start so that you don't kind of fumble over your words, if you're public speaking, like you build that confidence in the first 15 seconds and you do the same thing every time, so that you feel that confidence, and then it kind of gets you going, making sure that you're kind of acting yourself and you're negotiating on behalf of yourself. And you're not trying to play a role for somebody else. You're embracing the fact that you're a woman and you're different and that's okay. And that might actually sell better than if you were trying to be somebody else. You know, those, those types of just reminders and words of encouragement were really helpful for our team to hear. And she's also just like super witty and fun to talk to. So it's very entertaining. What's her name again? A lady and her book is okay. The most powerful woman in the room is you, right? Yeah. And so we're, we've got a few coming up. We're trying to do a negotiation session with an executive coach. We're trying to do a leadership session with one of our business school professors. We're trying to do a SA a session on implicit bias. I hope we can do another workout session. Cause I really like that.
Jordan Selleck
Well, if I need any female veterans from the special operations or fighter pilot communities to about leadership I might have a few actually, I will definitely do that. I have a, that would be excellent. Has it been any different in, you know, with having baby number three and, or has it just been like, yeah. Or how's it been having baby number three and it fun too. And I mean,
Lauren Mulholland
Maybe number three is like the best decision that we ever made.
Jordan Selleck
Can we actually delete that part? [inaudible] Translate that to Chinese from my in-laws as well.
Lauren Mulholland
No, I mean, I it's my first two daughters are 19 months apart. And so there is never a world where my oldest daughter will remember being the only child. They effectively have grown up together almost like twins and especially because my second child is a very tall for her age. They're about the same size. So people literally think they're twins. And now three years later we added a new baby into the mix and just watching them be like big sisters to her has been really awesome. And also I think as we've built out the team, you know, when we first started the, from CC, my middle child was seven months old. And so, you know, those are obviously like the more stressful times. And now that we are in a position where we have more resources and, you know, I have a little baby at home and we're very focused on work-life balance for all of our employees and to do that, you have to lead by example. And so, you know, I do set boundaries where I, I do have a period of time in my day, you know, after seven o'clock where nobody's allowed to schedule a meeting with me, you know, if they want to talk to me, we need to do it before I go home, which is usually by six 30 so that I can see her before she goes to bed. And then my little, my two bigger kids, they don't go to bed till like late at night. So
Jordan Selleck
I get plenty of time with them. But yeah—is there anything we, we know we have a 18 month bold and a four year old and I, you know, I felt like we're working too much. And then I just realized that we just have to include our four-year-old into what we're doing. So this morning I were out at seven 30 flying the drone and, and she learned how to like use that. And then it gets her interested to generally what we do. So we don't feel as guilty of like, you know, you know, mom and dad have to go off into work, like, yeah, yeah.
Lauren Mulholland
I did the same thing. Like last week I brought, had all three kids come in for lunch. So they could see the office and run around. I've had my oldest come in after school and sit at the, in the corner and do some drawing. And you know, everybody around here likes to see them too. And now there's when we first started, I was the only one with kids. We now have three sorry for people who have kids. And there's more on the way. So, you know, there's just, people are growing up.
Jordan Selleck
The other, the other interesting part about that is that, you know, people should feel comfortable if the firm creates a culture of long-term thinking, yes, you're out for how many months? Like, okay. Like, oh yeah, it doesn't matter. Like we work, we're going to know you for how many years. Like we
Lauren Mulholland
Have a parental leave policy. It applies to men and women for months. And we have two men that are taking it this year, which I'm really excited for. I will miss that. I will miss anybody who's gone for four months.
Jordan Selleck
Well, we've covered a lot of ground and this is, I am super excited. I've walked in here and just feel the energy and expanding. So thank you very much for doing this. Yeah. Thanks for coming.
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LAUREN MULHOLLAND is a Partner at MiddleGround where she is responsible for transaction sourcing and management of the Investment Team with John Stewart. She started her career in investment banking as part of the Financial Institutions Group at Banc of America Securities and then moved to Macquarie Capital to help launch a private capital markets platform. She subsequently worked at Monomoy Capital, where she was a Director on the investment team. Lauren received a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as well as an MBA with Honors from Columbia Business School.
In March 2020, Lauren was named among Buyouts Women in PE 10 rock stars making waves in private equity. Then in May 2020, Lauren was named to PEI’s The Future 40 List. While Lauren is now a certified New Yorker, her native Iowa roots are easily identifiable thanks to her love of corn. Lauren likes to spend her spare time golfing and she and her husband, Brian, are the proud parents of three girls, Maddie, Cece and Ellie.
