YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Sloane

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70
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2026-04-27
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2026-04-27
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  1. “Software which allowed us to pretty quickly see where the variance in cost of goods sold was coming from. Was it waste? Was it a reportioning or was it theft? Then we were able to start managing to that. Eventually we moved the stroke of a margins within that business from 11% to closer to 15 or 16%. If you think about a business that beneath that store level EBITDA line has GNA, so the 11% store level margin was maybe 7% EBITDA margin and we moved that up to 12 or 13%. That's quite material. The examples today are similar to the examples back then perhaps on a larger scale with 4 billion of AUM today versus 23 Burger Kings. But you'd be surprised how many founders we come across and we'll show them what tech adoption can do to”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I'll take you back to 2014, which was the first Burrking investment we ever made. The union economic at the time was about $1.1 million of sales per box and about 11% stroll of a margin. What we saw is that through technology and thoughtful capital allocation, there was a real opportunity to increase the overall equity value. What we were able to do pretty quickly was align up all of the $1.1 million Burr P&Ls in the country that had similar wage state profiles through benchmarking C that these particular restaurants were off by about three to four hundred base points. Some of that was food costs, some of that was on the labor line. This was our first iteration with investing in technology to grow the enterprise value of these businesses within that business. We put in food costs.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “$4 a pound or income consumer, which was our core consumer, was relatively squeezed, and the stock goes back down to a dollar idiots again. Fortunately, we were able to bring in a new CEO, Deborah Derby, who's now the CEO of one of our businesses. She took earnings in that business from a trough of $60 million a year at year end 2022 to when we sold the business. A year and a half later, $150 million. Talking about the highs being high and the lows being low, you're never as smart as you look and you're never as dumb as you look. The truth is somewhere in the middle. George Roberts from KKR has a line. As long as the capital keeps flowing, eventually good things will happen, of which that story would certainly be true for. And Royce Youngff has a line, as long as you keep the chess pieces on the chessboard, you can keep playing. We would repeat those two things to ourselves during COVID when you can imagine our entire portfolio looked like some version of that burricking business because it was all revenue zero.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Burking in Popeye's business into a larger Burking business and became the largest shareholders of that company. The day we did the deal, we merged in at 8.35 a share. And the stock ran up that day to 10. And we're high fiving. We think we're geniuses. This is amazing. Eight months later, the stock's at 98 cents because of COVID and a bunch of missteps we had made. You can imagine the stock's at 98 cents. Alex and I are some of the only people in office in New York City in March. The bonds are trading in the 70s. The lenders are organizing against us. However smart we felt the day the stock popped to 10 when we did the merger, we felt a hundred times dumber on that day. We ended up battling through that and did a bunch of stuff that was relatively smart and retrospect. The stock gets back to seven and we're okay. We made it through and now it's middle of 21 and then boom, inflation hits our beef costs go from $2 a pound.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Through it, get extra liquidity, and stand up our distribution business so that we could distribute hamburgers to the restaurants and all the things that we had to do in order to make it through those really tough times and see the other side of it. Just think about the bad times also. When we took the business public, it was May of 19 and we reverse merged our 220 unit.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Thinking of the low lights. It certainly was not a one way street up into the right from 23 Burger Kings to 1100 and the billion dollar sale. There were a lot of ups and a lot of downs. There is that saying the lows are so much lower than the highs are high, which is how Madden I feel about it in one of the reasons why I'm so grateful for having Matt and my partnership with him because that is what kept us going is having each other and some of the darker days. When I think about that journey, I think more about COVID when the stores were being shut down and our suppliers were filing for Chapter 7 and we couldn't even get hamburgers, let alone people to staff the restaurants. The banks were agitated and we had to jump through a lot of hoops to get liquidity. And then you got through COVID and all of a sudden you got punched in the face yet again with all the inflationary challenges and evaluators. I think about the resilience that that showed and our ability to get back up and”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Broceadkoff was our professor we met at Business School. Royce, the RY and Adri built Abrey with his partner, Andrew Banks. Royce teaches a class at Harvard Business School called Financial Management of Smaller Firms, which is the most popular class at HBS. It's three sections, standing room only, very hard to get into. Matt and I were fortunate that we did get into the class and it in some ways changed our lives because the support from Royce gave us the confidence to keep going certainly helped us institutionalize the firm when we went from our initial set of investors to building an institutional investment firm. Royce was instrumental with that and making introductions and serving as an advisor and reference for us. So another person who without his mentorship and support, I think we wouldn't be here today.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Was an HBS email address is a really powerful weapon. We would email CEOs of huge companies that we were trying to learn from and they would all reply because of the email address. I don't know if they thought we were trying to write a case study about them or what, but we always tell younger people you have two years to use this weapon, use it because people will reply.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “HBS was an amazing experience. We learned a ton and made a lot of great friends and built out our network. It's been great to us. I would say, though, that it starts further back at Harvard College where my group of friends has been incredibly successful and helpful to us as we built the firm. And it's people like Josh Krishner from Thrive and Alex Taubman from Long Lake and Reed Raymond at Apollo and Brian Feinstein at Bessemer, my brother Jake, was also in school with us and built an incredible business at Springdale. The list goes on. But without that group of people being very, very close to us, I really believe we wouldn't be able to build GSP. The other benefit of going to business school is it gives you two years to spend a lot of time on whatever entrepreneurial pursuit you want to think about. The other thing, which I don't think we'd have a full appreciation for until we started reaching out to people.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “But at the time it felt like a total risk reward in our favor was either heads we win or tails we can potentially win a different way I'll just say our prior firms were incredibly supportive of us which I think was amazing and we're forever grateful to those mentors there who enabled us to take this risk and feel like we could do it and our parents too our families who were super supportive I think we joke about our mothers who are a little bit confused when we told them we were leaving our fancy private equity jobs to become KFC franchisees that initial conversation stung a little bit but incredibly supportive families and incredibly supportive former firms that gave us the confidence to go out and try it so”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “I think we had the benefit when we were at business school in our early to mid 20s of being inexperienced relatively dumb and very unencumbered. So we could go and take a risk, which to us it didn't feel like much of a risk because either it would work out and hopefully the transaction would be successful and perhaps we could do a second one or a third one. We had no money. We had no mortgages. We weren't married yet. We had no people relying on us. Our view was even if it doesn't work out we'll have become hopefully far better investors from the operational failure and the things we would have learned from it surely Caterton and Apollo are former employers would be even more interested in hiring us because we've operated and weren't from the experiences and the failure. So today would we go out and sign a bunch of personal guarantees and put it all on the line? I hope not. If my wife's listening, then we definitely would not.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Idea and we're in our office, we have the original business plan from the first deal we looked at, it was 5kF season, Vermont, ultimately that KFC deal didn't work out. But what we realized while building value in the Burger King business was that there was a massive opportunity to invest in fragmented markets, high quality businesses behind this baby boomer generational transition, 10 trillion of assets were so set to change hands over the next two decades where we could build an engine to be the capital partners of choice to America's best founders. And we built an engine to go after that opportunity set, which is ultimately our firm today.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “I always remind people talking to investors, prospective LPs, or prospective team members who spend a lot of our time recruiting. You have to think of GSP a little differently in the sense it's not like I was a partner at KKR and Matt was a partner at Blackstone and we got upset with our economic arrangement and decided we could do it on our own. Our firm was very much built organically. We think of ourselves as entrepreneurs. We run a business. Our business is there to produce extraordinary risk adjusted returns. We had this idea, which literally started as a phone call four days into business school where I called Matt and said we should open a Wendy's or an Auntie Anne's in Harvard Square. That led us down a rabbit hole where we realized that there was a compelling opportunity to buy resilient businesses at very attractive prices, add technology, data science capital capital allocation management talent, grow them through M&A and organically. It was an entrepreneur.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “This is a great idea. Are we going to make three times or five times? Who knows, but it's going to be great. Let's think again there because some of those sorts of discussions are actually the most dangerous ones.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “I don't know whether that's intentional or if that's reflexive, but we have an executive coach that we work closely with that we've worked with for a decade who helps us manage through conflict and think through strategic issues and people issues. The fact that we are the same age, we're trained during the same financial cycle at some more institutions makes the fact that we disagree on everything important from the standpoint of, I think one of the real risks to our firm over the last 13 years is groupthink. environment where people are supposed to disagree, particularly as you get closer to potentially closing a transaction and avoiding groupthink is something that I know the two of us spend a lot of time on, our senior team spends a lot of time on, and our executive coach spends a lot of time on. Alex has a line from one of the Adam Grant books that he's always espousing around our office. The book was called Think Again. That's a huge part of our process is you can get no room. Everyone nods their heads and says,”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Those that know us well, they know we're actually very different. We look similar. I take offense to that. We grew up together. We were trained at similar parts of the cycle. Different firms with different investing styles, certainly. But on the surface, there's a lot more similarities. We've both been happily married since we were young. We've each got three kids around the same age go to school together, spend all of our time together. We're actually very, very different people. To Matt's point about bickering and fighting and disagreeing, we take the opposite side of pretty much every argument. I tend to be the optimist, which is strange because of having been trained at Apollo. Matt tends to be the pessimist. He hates everything, which again is strange having been. But then when Matt loves something, I hate it.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “We can say things to one another that perhaps in a private equity firm where two partners came together and spun out from larger firms and everyone's being a little more polite, it would take longer to get to the right answer or to get to a place where there's agreement or disagreement and because we've known each other for so long I think we can short circuit a lot of that.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Asset from the standpoint of we've known each other for 30 years. Matt, we're older than that now. It used to be 30 years, but longer than that. Known each other for far more than 30 years. We share a desk. We have one big polycom speaker phone between us. Take all of our meetings together, all our calls together, and all of our travels together. There's something to the fact that having known each other for so long and being so comfortable with one another, we can get at the truth. We can get away from worrying about people's feelings versus getting at the right answer, people who start working at GSP that are initially terrified because they see the two of us yelling and bickering and arguing with each other all day. But that's very much part of our process.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Except every franchise brand rejected us as franchisees, except for Burger King. And I know you did an episode with Dan Schwartz and Alex Bering from 3G. They talked a bit about giving young people the opportunities to be successful. That's what happened. We first invested in a 23-unit Burger King franchisee business that was based in the Garnett Street train station in Henderson, North Carolina. They gave us this shot. We were successful with that business that allowed us to grow. We ultimately got to 1100 franchises. We were the biggest in the country. Took the company public and sold it about two years ago now for over a billion dollars back to the franchisor. So it was quite a journey and a lot of ups and downs, but that's the origin story. That's how we started the firm.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “I grew up together. We've been best friends since we were little kids. We grew up three blocks from each other. We started our careers. I was investment banking in Goldman. I was at City. I was at Apollo. Matt was at Caterton doing private equity there. We went to business school together planning to go back to those jobs after graduation. But while we were there, we developed a thesis.”

    2026-04-27 · Capital Allocators · Alex Sloane & Matt Perelman – Buy-and-Build Playbook in the Core Economy at GSP (EP.499) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source