YouSaid · the spoken record

Eric Resnick

lines on the record
64
first
2023-06-19
most recent
2023-06-19
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “New York accent. He goes, Rich, you don't need to worry about that. This isn't a real corporate headquarters. One of the ones that has a foundation and a Starbucks in the ground floor, they're trailers. And Rich looks at them like, I don't trust this, what's going on here? You're pulling one over my eyes. And John Griswold was, I think, president of CNL at the time, and he was in the room too. He was overseeing the deal. He looks at Gary, looks at me. He looks at Rich. He says, I've been there. They're trailers. They can keep the trailers and infuse our culture with that sense of, look, this is your investor's money. Don't waste it on fancy offices. We now have an office with a foundation, and we have a Starbucks around the corner. We've lost a little bit of that, but we do try to infuse that culture of discipline with our team by keeping the story of the trailers and the legacy alive. I'm curious to ask how you describe the culture of your organization. I think we describe it in a couple ways. One, it's a group of people that are passionate deeply about travel and leisure and what that means.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Our team with that culture going forward. We didn't want to lose the offices. So we were selling KSL Recreation Corporation. That was the KKR business to CNL. It was $2.2 billion. Really big deal. 2004. And back then, you actually all got around a closing table. And we were in New York, Simpson Thatcher. I was our law firm. And there must have been, I don't know, hundreds of piles of paper, all the exhibits to all the contracts. And the general counsel of CNL was going through them, making sure that the exhibits matched with their expectations were. And he came to the excluded asset page, and it said global headquarters was an excluded asset. Name was Rich Files. And you could see the look on Rich's face was that he had caught a kid with his hand in the cookie jar. What do you mean you're excluding the global headquarters? It was like the IBM corporate headquarters. And so I'll never forget, I was there with this phone named Gary Horowitz, an attorney, a partner at Simpson Thatcher, and he's got great.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It's been a great relationship, but we do joke from time to time that maybe we went to start at our firm if it wasn't for that Blackberry. What are some of the values that I was a CFO of that company at the time when we sold it to, it was a group called Seonel Hotels, which ultimately sold to Mezref. And we had been in trailers for 12 years. First double Y construction trailers. And then we were on a temporary permit with the city of La Quinta. And then finally, the city said, listen, we're not going to renew this temporary permit anymore. These are not temporary. You've been here 10 years. And we had nine months and we had to find office space. So the only thing we could basically do was do more modular offices. So we literally bought 18 single white trailers and welded them together, put a false stucco exterior, painted the windows below so as a white stucco with blue windows just like the LeQing to Resort that we owned down the road. And that was our office. And we thought, boy, we had died and gone to heaven. We had our own dedicated little building. There was no foundation. All sorts of wildlife crawling all over the place underneath the floorboards, but that was our headquarters. So we wanted to be able to.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “And the name of the person he was meeting with also started with S. I clicked the wrong name and I watched the email go, and to this day my heart drops and I feel like it's going into the ether. I literally threw my phone against the wall, stepped on it, tried to break it because I realized, oh no, what are the implications of sending this email to the wrong person? Sure enough, it created some awkward moments in that conversation when we're joking around. We say, well, I guess maybe that email was positive that it caused an awkward moment. We ended up creating our own firm out of it. But the reality was it was a really tough decision. And we had the entrepreneurial instinct, I think, in us that we just wanted to see if we could do it on our own. It wasn't anything negative about KKR. It was about wanting to do it ourselves. And we had the confidence from a couple of those existing investors. Maybe we could actually do this. And so we did. And funnily enough, when you fast forward now, it's been 18 years. We've now done two deals with KKR as a partner. And those have been two amazing deals.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Really use the Blackberry properly. You had to get something called a BlackBerry server and it cost like $10,000. It was one thing to buy the Blackberry for whatever it cost $500 or whatever. But we're not buying a $10,000 Blackberry server. So Mike comes up with this workaround that instead of buying the Blackberry server, we're just going to forward all of our work emails to our Blackberry. Great. The only problem is you can't reply to anything. So you have to forward it again to the person you want to reply to. Anyway, long story short, Mike's going into very important negotiating session with KKR to talk about whether or not we were going to re-up and do this again with them or go do it on our own. And I got this email from Mike that he was going in. So I was just joking around and I go to send him an email back that says, remember Mike, if it doesn't go well, don't worry, we have choices. One of those things that today you'd put a little smiley face or something. This isn't really meaningful. I'm just joking with you and just fuck up or whatever. So I hit forward. I type in ask for Shannon.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Respect for KKR. They were an amazing partner that enabled us to do things we probably could never have dreamed of. We had had a great run, and we were approached by some investors, some of KKR's investors actually, that said, look, what are you going to do next? Do you want to do it all over again, but do it with us on a direct basis and raise your own fund? And we'd never thought about raising your own fund, but we started to think about it after that. And we were debating, do we redo this again with KKR or do we go and do it on our own? We weren't quite sure. And we were having lots of these conversations. And I don't think it's the reason why we ended up raising our own fund, but it's a funny story. Mike Shannon was given a gift by his wife for his birthday of a blackberry once. This is obviously before iPhones because some of the KKR partners had him. And she asked me whether or not I thought he would like a blackberry. And I said immediately, yes, because I really wanted a blackberry. I knew if he had a blackberry, I could get one, but there was no way I was going to get blackberry if he wasn't into it. So we get the blackberries.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “They ended up doing golf courses and beach resorts and golf resorts. They did some private aviation FBO deals. So it was all investing in businesses that Mike and Larry had experience and exposure to through being the management team that led Vale Resorts, but they weren't ski. And Mike and Larry would source all the deals. They'd finance them. They would operate them themselves. It was an integrated owner-operator. And then ultimately sell them. But KKR was our board, our controlling shareholder, and our funder. How long did that run? That went from 1993 to the 2004 timeframe. We started selling, basically invested $500 million of equity across 12 deals in the space from 93 to 03. And then we started selling things later in 03. We finished selling that whole platform in 07, but the biggest transaction was in 04. Had you decide what to do next? It was really tough. We had tremendous respect in half, tremendous.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “by wandering Larry Lichleider with me. Larry was the CO of Vale at the time. So the K, the S and the L that became KSL, and Mike and Larry developed what was called a management buildup at the time where the KKR principals, George and Henry, they were really impressed by what Mike and Larry had created in Veil, that it wasn't just a real estate business, it was an operating business to go along with that. And they thought you could apply this to recreation and leisure more broadly. So it was a buildup really to do that. And they backed Mike and Larry. And one of the first deals was in Laquinta, California. They moved there and started our offices there, basically in 1993. We were independent of KKR in the sense that we weren't part of KKR. We were a portfolio company. And we were an integrated investment and operating platform for KKR to deploy capital in the travel and leisure business more broadly. They thought maybe they would do ski. We didn't do a ski deal for about 15 years and never with KKR, ironically, but that was the original.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I call me, and he just said, Hey, I've heard about you through a mutual friend, and I need a new CFO because my old CFO is going to KKR to be a partner there. Would you like to come interview for it? I was floored and I said, yes. And I actually asked a few people for advice and they told me I'd be crazy not to take the job. Mike was the smartest person they knew and I should go do that. So in 1992 Apollo bought Vale. Basically, I took control of the debt, the parent company of Vale that owned a bunch of businesses, went into distress and bankruptcy. So Paula ended up owning Vail. And Mike Shannon decided that he was going to leave. And he had met KKR, Henry Kravis and George Roberts, who also at Holmes in Vale, threw his time in Vale. They were on local nonprofit boards together. And Henry and George convinced Mike that they should back Mike, so the K was KKR, the asked Mike Shannon, and Mike said, I'd love to join.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Ended up becoming vice president of a bunch of things, all the non accounting parts of finance, strategy, and budgeting and M&A and investor relations and things, and got to be on the executive committee of Vale at that time. I was young and fortunate I didn't really know what I didn't know. And for five years, we doubled Vale in size. We went public. We did a bunch of other acquisitions in the hospitality space. And then one day, a fellow named Mike Shannon called me. Mike's a force of personality, if you know Mike. He's one of the most affable, charismatic people you would ever know. And Salted the Earth from Wisconsin, and ironically, he had been the prior president of Vale from 85 to 92. And so this is, I was in Vale 96 to 2000. I knew of Mike. I met him once. My wife had worked for Mike. She had worked in Vale. Actually, she met her in Vale. She ran marketing for Beaver Creek and a number of other sales and marketing related jobs. I really didn't know Mike very well at all.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Apollo was our owner. It was a privately held business at the time. Unbeknownst to me, my first week I got to Vale. I went into a meeting room where I was the analyst listening in on the first conversation about Vale associates at the time was the name of the company owned just Vale and Beaver Creek Scurious. They wanted to buy Breckeridge and Keystone Scurious. We started talking about going public. I don't even think I knew it was owned by Apollo until I got there. So I really walked into this situation where I was in the ski business, but I was really getting private equity experience. And I was the one person who had worked in McKinsey. And if I'm the East Coast and speak that language, so I was the person in Vale who was tasked with being the go-between with Apollo and the company. And that gave me a window into the world of private equity, into the ski business, into IPOs and acquisitions and finance. And from there I went. I was very fortunate and I had a lot of opportunities for professional growth in Vale. I was there for five years.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “30 years later, and The travel and leisure business broadly and still in the ski business. What was that experience like? First got in. Veil, well, there weren't any traffic lights in the town. Car Remember thinking, God, all these people, all this traffic, these are all people who spend their whole year To have that one week vacation here in Vegas. Get to live Is pretty cool. Get paid to live here Even better. It was a great experience for me. Good My Wife, my kids Career all developed out of that time You do in those years you were working for Vail? I was the quote unquote manager.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “After two years, my analyst program was up. I was thinking about what do I do next? I ran into Terry and he You do Combine your vocation with your avocation. I looked at Exotically What does that mean? And he To ski. Why don't you try to work in the ski business? And I was 23. didn't really know anything about the business world Than what was right in front of me. There is a skeep business. I said, sure, I'll connect you to a couple people. No idea what I was getting into, but that led me. In the ski business. I was going to experiment for a year, see if it worked. And if not, go back to graduate school or something.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I guessed on today's show is Eric Resnick, the co-founder and CEO of KSL Capital Partners, a private equity firm launched in 2005 that specializes in the travel and leisure industry. KSL seeks to create remarkable destinations that inspire joy and awe. The firm manages $21 billion, including investments in Altera ski resorts, Margaritaville, St. Regis, and many others. Our conversation covers KSL's beginning as a KKR portfolio company, the formation of KSL capital partners after a successful exit, and the case for travel and leisure investments. We discuss sourcing targets, the consumer experience, operations, competition, capital allocation, opportunities, and risks. We close discussing exit strategies and the future of KSL.”

    2023-06-19 · Capital Allocators · Eric Resnick – Ski, Golf, and Vacation Investing at KSL (EP.322) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source