YouSaid · the spoken record

Hamish Corlett

lines on the record: 48
first: 2021-10-14
most recent: 2021-10-14
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

“Uncomfortable things now. Don't put them off. Don't sweep them under the carpet and go headlong into them as well because it makes you better. It makes you stronger.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this has always been a part of me, and that is my favorite saying you're not going to be surprised to hear this, you can't avoid this comfort. If I really knew that and understood that in an early age, I would have dialed up on uncomfortable things way earlier in my life and have the courage to do that. I really believe that you can't avoid discomfort, whether it's with your health, with relationships, with business. TDM was started in an uncomfortable place. basically didn't make any money out of TDM for years, like seven, eight years. I don't really know like a long period of time. With your health, you can't make bad health decisions. You have to get uncomfortable. You have to do the hard things. Same in relationships. If you don't have the hard conversations, that stuff will come and get you at some point in time. And the discomfort compounds over time. What I really wish I embrace an early age was embracing young.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Nothing is more important than hard work and integrity. That's a clear learning from a very early age, both very hard workers who made decisions on their values first and foremost above all else. As a kid growing up, as a young person trying to make career decisions and as someone trying to grow TDM into something special, what they taught me in those two areas, work ethic and values-based judgment, that's the cornerstone of everything.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a huge amount of learning, but the most important part was if you think like a long-term business owner, and especially with that one, where we own 10 or 15% of the business, it may as well have been a private investment. Like you are in a marriage. There was no way out. If we got that wrong, there was no easy way out. So you better know who your partner is back to front. And whilst we did a heap of due diligence on the business, we spent a heap of time with that particular person. We didn't do sufficient due diligence. If that business was in Australia, we would have leveraged the networks and really known that person inside out. We were complacent and we were charmed by someone that knew how to charm us, to say the right thing.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The biggest investment mistake we made was David's tea. It was a US listed business, a Canadian tea retailer, where we lost a hell of a lot of money. This was 10 or 12 years into TDM, like to make your biggest mistake that far into your investing career was very humbling. And that's one of the wonderful things about what we do. It is a very, very humbling pursuit being an investor because inevitably you make mistakes. That was a huge mistake and what had come down to it came down people and culture. We got the 40% owner chairman of the business very, very wrong. We still believe this this day. That could have been a wonderful business, but we got the people in culture very, very wrong.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It only gets stronger because we don't sweep stuff under the carpet. We're good at having hard conversations. Hopefully that's something that keeps remaining part of the culture here at Teddy.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As I outside my parents, outside you, the two people that come to mind are Tom and Ben, my two business partners, when it really comes down to it, they're the two most influential people in my professional life. We have a very unique and very special relationship. We're very different people, often when new team members join TDM, they comment, oh wow, you guys are really different people. How does this actually work? There's a real brotherhood with the three of us. And we kind of pinch ourselves in terms of how complementary the skill sets and personalities are. And this will make them cringe. But it's a relationship that's very much born out of love and trust. And that's why it works.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talking in absolutes, it's very much an entrenched philosophy to think in probabilities. We're in the business of trying to predict the future. No one knows. Probably my biggest pet peeve when it comes to investing is we live in a very gray world and no one knows the future.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Unconstructive polarization that really presses my button. We live in a world where there is way too much of that with many, many adverse outcomes. And it means we can't have high quality conversations about things that really, really matter. I love having those conversations unconstructive and polarizing conversations is something that really pressed my buttons.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a daily habit kind of person. I got a very specific morning routine. The most important aspects of that morning routine is walking the dogs and having breakfast with my daughter and my wife every morning.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Important at the time. The pressure's still there, it's just changed and I would say even more significant now than it's ever been. And you've got to have every member of the team has to be amped up about what that opportunity is and why we do what we do.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've got to have the right team of people. There's a level of humility and hunger that every single one of the team, it doesn't matter where you are in the team, has to have to be a part of this team. And we've become pretty attuned to seeing that pretty quickly as well. And that can stem from all sorts of things. It's really the combination of those two things that you've got to have in the DNA of every individual. And then as TDM as a whole, I mean, we feel like we are just at the start. Like we are more hungry now than we have ever been because the aspirations are bigger. We feel like we've been given an opportunity. And so the responsibility actually executed on that opportunity to have the impact on the world that we think we can have is now bigger than ever. So when it's just two or three of you just doing what you love and you just need to provide for your family, like that is a level of responsibility and pressure that is very real.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if everything to do is it's a category of things, and that is putting myself in uncomfortable situations. I love being uncomfortable on a daily basis, and that is something that I crave, whether it's a tough workout, whether it's an ice bath, tough sauna session, putting myself outside my comfort zone in a different way, or even just doing a breathing practice when you're really, really busy and you've got a million things to do. That's a really, really hard thing to do. I love doing things that are uncomfortable.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where do I want to be in 10 or 20 years from now is we've got a really clear vision for what we think we can do using TDM as a vehicle. And when we think about the four stakeholders of the business, we've got clients, the companies we invest in, the team and the community. And we're more amped up about this and what we can do for those four stakeholders than ever. So from a team perspective, we just want to have a place where people love coming to work every day. 30 people now, we think we'll go to at least 50 people. We want every single one of those people to skip to work every day, to feel challenged, to do their best work, and for it to be a place.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which means we have to do things very differently to what we did previously. We're very private, introverted people. So once upon a time, we were nervous about having a website three or so years ago we crawled out from under our rock and thought, okay, well, maybe we need to tell the world who we are and that we actually exist. If we want to back these great businesses and founders, they're going to know that we actually were around. So we're much more outward with our brand, which even five years ago we never would have embraced.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some context, the very first website we had, which is probably the one I'm most proud of, is we just had one page and on that page was a picture of a turtle. And we are the turtle and not the hare. And that's one thing that has not changed. I mean, the portfolio hasn't really changed that much over the course of one or two or three years. Our beliefs and our values have not changed. One iota. But when I look at where TDM was 10 or 15 years ago, or even five years ago, I feel like there's massive change. One of the most important frameworks that I have in life is this idea of distinguishing between principles and methods. And I'd say the principles around which TDM was built, how we run this business, how we work together, haven't changed. But the methods of how they express themselves are very different nowadays. We have a team of 30 people now.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Way I described that is the transition from a player to a coach. And that is there's still aspects where I am a player on this team, but increasingly more of my time is spent as a coach. And success for me is really assessed in terms of my self-assessment is how am I helping other people do their best work? How am I helping them grow? How am I helping them be successful? That's the benchmark for me rather than am I coming up with the next best idea or anything that is more me-centric or player-centric. That's very much that coaching mentality, which I got to say, I love, and that's one of the most rewarding parts of being part of the growth of what we do. I love the coaching aspects side of things.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That made soil to us. And we had a really simple philosophy that hasn't changed since day one is we just want to invest in and support businesses that we're proud of. We feel if we do that very simple thing, everything else falls into place. And you mentioned it before, our aspirations when we started out were much more humble than they are now. We just want to do what we love doing. Now our aspirations are much bigger and we really want to create something special here. But the thing that guides us is this going to make our kids proud? My daughter's only three years old at the moment, but when she's 20, is she going to look back and think, I'm proud of the businesses my dad invested in and the business that he was a part of? When we look through that lens, decision making becomes much clearer in terms of what we're trying to do here.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now more than ever. As you know, we spent a lot of time on the road and that has an impact on family. There's no substitute for us despite everything that's happened with video conferencing and the general acceptance of that. There's no substitute for spending time with people in person who we are backing to grow businesses. Going out to dinner, getting to know them as human beings, building those relationships. That means we have to spend a lot of time on the road. We've got a team in the Philippines at the moment that help us on the operational side of things. Predominantly the team is Australia based. We think that'll stay the same for a while, but we think that it is a reasonably high degree of probability we'll have a team in the US in the next five or ten years. Some of the team might disagree with me on that, but we're talking in probability, so that's probably on the cards.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our biggest challenge really is just scaling the business operationally. We feel really high conviction that we can continue to generate good returns. We feel like as investors, we've now got an awesome team of people. Really, it's the operational scaling of the actual business that is the key challenge. So I'll give you an example. So we manage money in a very different way to most in that we have individually managed accounts for every single client. We don't have a fund where everyone is pulled together. In the 15 years, we haven't been able to find a software platform that can run those individually managed accounts at scale. So we have to employ a team of software engineers and build it ourselves. So that's one example of the scaling challenge to go from $1.5 to $15 billion over the next 10 years. We're going to be employing software engineers to enable.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In an ideal world, if we were to paint the perfect scenario, we would have a certain amount of money in each of those different buckets, but we're also very bottoms-up driven as well. So we do just go to where the opportunity is first. Where is the next best place to deploy capital? The final piece is obviously cash as well. And on average, we've held about 20% of the portfolio in cash. When the market is more frothy, we'll have more cash when we think the market is cheaper, we'll have less cash. But generally speaking, if we're to wave a magic wand, we'd have 10% of the portfolio in seedlings and maybe a third in each of the other parts of the portfolio.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All investing involves risk of loss. Views are subject to change. Not investment advice or a recommendation copyright twenty twenty six Morgan Stanley All Rights Reserved. And now back to the show.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A company like Goodsman and Gomez, which we think is the McDonald's are the next generation. It's a great Australian Mexican food retail business that we think can be a $50 billion business down the track, good to great example would be Slack, which we invested in last year, which we thought was a wonderful business that could then transition into a generational leader. So a company in the portfolio at the moment is Spotify, where it is the clear leader of audio, but we think it can continue to grow for many, many years to come.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Businesses as well. These are two, three, four hundred five hundred million dollars of revenue and they are still growing at a rapid rate. They're through that really hard nuts and bolts scaling period. They've got a high quality management team. And now they're aspiring to be a great generational business and it's peddled to the metal on that opportunity. And the final part of the portfolio are the generational leaders. These are the proven industry leaders that we think can continue to grow for the decade to come. So to give some examples, in the seedling bucket, we've got business like Coltramp, great Australian software business, which is at the earliest stage. We want that to then transition into the next gen leader category where we can put more money to work in that business. And it is aspiring to be a truly great generational business. In the next gen business, we've got”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the portfolio. We have built really good relationships with the management teams. We really believe when we're super high conviction on the business, they're still probably private businesses and we are doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on that investment. And that's where we really start to roll the sleeves up. We take one or two board positions and we deploy our operating advisors to help scale the business. So those tend to be businesses that are aspiring to be great businesses that are aspiring to be publicly listed. And we can help them in that scaling process. The third component is good to great. So again, they can be businesses that have transitioned from the next gen leaders, from these are really good category leading businesses in their industry, and they're now aspiring to be great generational leaders. They can be private, but sometimes they can be public.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From the trading portfolio pre those years were very good, but that is the nature of a bull market. It's the bear market you need to worry about. So how we put together a portfolio today has evolved since that 09-2010 period. So now we have four categories of investments in the portfolio. We've got seedlings. We've got the next gen leaders. We've got good to great. And we've got the generational leaders. So just to break down those four components, the seedlings tend to be earlier stage businesses. They tend to be private businesses where we are deploying a small amount of capital because they're at early stage. They're fast growing. We're just getting to know the founders and we're supporting those businesses and helping them scale. The next part of the portfolio, the next gen leaders, is usually businesses that come out of the seedling part.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's one area that has evolved quite significantly and to provide what I think is an amusing contrast to where we started in the early days of TDM, we had two parts of the portfolio. One we'd called the trading portfolio. These were generally the lower quality businesses. They were still okay. They were lower quality, but they were really cheap. That was a value investor inside of us. Then we had the high quality part of the portfolio, which was the businesses we thought we could own for many years. They were growing fast, etc, etc. So that was the very crude portfolio management perspective until 2008 happened. When 2008 happened, we got the rude awakening that owning crappy businesses, even if they're cheap, is not a good idea. If you're a long-term business owner. So that was the great cleansing for us, the 0809 period and the trading portfolio ceased to exist after that. I'd say the return.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of our core values, which is where the yellow hat, which really goes to psychological safety. So you've got to have an environment. We feel like we have to have an environment where everyone can express their view wholeheartedly express their concerns or fears around an investment or go out on a limb. And so this term where the yellow hat is a really valuable term that gets used every day at times.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two major changes for us is the number of people, as you said, which has gone from two to ten, and the quantum money. And so when it was a small number of people and you're managing a few million dollars, so each position is when the hundreds of thousands or maybe millions of dollars, that's a very different scenario to where we are now where we've got a larger investment team and we're looking to deploy hundreds of millions of dollars into businesses. So pulling apart those two aspects on the number of people, that's probably the area where we've thought an immense amount about this. Again, you're a decision making business, so we think a lot about how we make those decisions and optimizing how you make a decision as a group of 10 people is not straightforward. First and foremost, the team really matters. You've got to not only have super high quality people, but super high quality people that are very much culturally aligned to buy into this way of doing things. Probably the most important aspect there is going to one.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To people that are banging the table saying, yes, this business isn't perfect, or yes, this appears to be a high valuation, but I really believe in this or we really believe in this and this is why. And then the final piece is where we use a very, very clear framework in terms of how we assess each investment. We've got four pillars. One is growth opportunity. The second is competitive advantage, where we lean heavily on Hamilton Helmer's Seven Powers. People and culture is the third pillar and valuation is the fourth. It's a pretty simple framework, but allows us to break each investment into those four component parts. And there's a lot of detail under each of those parts. And then we assess that in a more objective way and really pull apart the investment thesis on that basis.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Little bit uncomfortable, but the valuations looks obviously cheap. Or on the other side of things, the business is an amazing business, but the valuation for us is uncomfortably at the upper end of what we would pay. Either way, what I say a lot is that you can't avoid this comfort. If you want to make great investments, you can't avoid discomfort. It's either there's something that's in the business that you don't feel warm, buzzy about, but the price compensates you for it. All this is a wonderful business and the bet you're making is that the price you paid is a fair price. And if you're paying a fair price and the business continues to grow, it's fair value over a long period of time, you're going to make the returns. It's usually one of those two things, but very rarely do you feel warm and fuzzy when you're making great investments. So out of that, you've got to have a champion of every investment idea. So internally, when we're making an investment decision, there's usually one or two.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go well, then they get criticized. We have never in the entire history of TDM there been any sort of blame for an investment decision or even any sort of putting someone up on a pedestal because they've made an investment decision. It's very much a one-in-all-in. The flip side of that is that you're going to have different degrees of conviction with any investment decision. So there is a threshold of conviction that every single person in the investment decision has to have for us to make the decision. Despite all of that, we're trying to make non-consensus decisions. You can't produce great returns for a long period of time by making easy consensus decisions. And so that usually means one or two things that when we're making an investment decision in a business, there's usually something in the business that other investors really don't like.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Make all decisions together. There are some pros and cons of that and we've thought a lot about how do we continue to execute that as well and what is the right number of people. We think around 10 people is probably the maximum number we can have to effectively execute that decision making capability. We try to make that very much a decision making meritocracy. Everyone gets the chance to share their views on an investment decision. Everyone has to be across every investment decision we make. And once we make a decision, it's one in all in. So one of the really nice things out of that is that you get an array of different perspectives on an investment decision and also you get no blame. That's one of the things that we always wanted to avoid that when we make an investment decision, it's not one or two or three people that have made that decision. And if it goes well, they get pats on the back. And if it doesn't,”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Needless to say, it is the most important thing that we do. We are first and foremost a decision-making business. So we think a lot about how we make that decision. So putting the deep research to one side, clearly we do an enormous amount of research and sometimes we can do years and years of research before we actually deploy money in a business or backing a management team. In terms of how we actually execute the decisions, there are three key components. And I'd say that how we've made decisions has evolved over time, where TDM started from, if we think about the first decision-making unit, was just two of us making the best investment decisions we could, and we had to be on the same page. And that has expanded now to an investment team of 10 people. Still to this day, we have a core value of hunters a pack. And part of that core value is that we...”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Helps us make better decisions when we are actually deploying money, which needs to be really purposeful. And still with very much a mindset of is the risk reward calibration appropriate?”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“As you say that, I still viscerally feel the pain of I know the investment you're talking about there. And we really strongly believe that as an investor, you've got to know who you are. And there's no one right way of investing. We really feel like we have to be authentic to the people we are and who we are culturally as an investment firm. And one of those aspects is that we hate losing money. We grew up as value investors and it was very much a situation of you've got to preserve capital first and then think about returns next. So we've made around 65 investments over the course of TDM's life and we've lost money three times and we've lost material money two out of those three times. And those two times in particular are excruciatingly painful and irrationally so. You've hammered that home to us. It is irrational except to the extent that the pain that we feel for losing money.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been one of the key reasons why we always very purposely wanted to constrain the number of clients we had. And when we had next to no money in the early years of TDM, we wouldn't accept money from people if we thought they would be flighty. We never wanted to have a lockup with clients. We only want clients that want to be here. Having said that, we've never had a client that's pulled their money. And every time the market has jitters, whether it's the GFC or most recent COVID-related issues, that's when we want our clients to be excited to deploy capital. But to be able to do that, you've got to have close relationships with your clients where they really trust you and understand the decisions you're making and the why behind those decisions. So we really feel like we're in partnership with our clients. That's how we built what we do here. And we're very, very fortunate to have clients that stick with us through thick and thin.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bunch of times they've been taken out at times where we'd say it's highly opportunistic. There's some jitters in the share market, share prices for 50, 70%. We're busy buying shares and building our stake and then weeks or months later those businesses got taken out. I mean, it's not the worst thing in the world and their successful investments to some extent. But where the portfolio is skewed to at the moment is very much private companies where we can genuinely own those businesses for at least 10 years. We've got one or two board seats. We're really involved in supporting those companies trying to add value and help grow those to be the great businesses that we think they can become. And IPO and a public listening is probably part of that journey for most of those businesses over time. But that is probably, that's more than 50% of the portfolio at the moment.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And there's been a little bit in Canada done a very small number of investments in Europe. But the other aspect as well is doing the private and public. And because we think of ourselves as long-term business owners, we actually don't care if a business is private or public. We just care what the growth profile is. We care what the competitive advantage is and will be and we care about people and culture. The frustrating thing for us on the public side of things is that too many times we spend years getting to know management teams, we spend years doing due diligence on companies and industries. And then we finally deploy capital in a business and too many times it's been taken out, often opportunistically. So StVAnt, Ellie May, Yodley, Slack more recently, these are businesses that we wanted to own for the decade ahead of us and we thought we had the right people to lead those businesses, the right strategies, and they get taken out.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're very much bottoms up investors. We're trying to find 10 or 15 of some of the greatest businesses in the world or businesses that are aspiring to be some of the greatest businesses in the world throughout the 16 or 17 year journey of TDM. We've never owned more than 15 businesses at any one point in time. And usually it's more like eight or ten. So each time we're deploying capital, we're thinking, well, at least this money is deployed for five years. But ideally, we're trying to deploy money for 10 years in a business and make 10, 15 times our money. We set up TDM with a very open mandate. And that means we can invest in private or public. We can invest anywhere in the world, whether it's the US, Canada, Australia, Europe. It doesn't really matter. We can invest in any sort of industry. Having said all of that, probably half of the investing we've done is in US-based businesses, the other half is in Australian businesses.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They would give me a call in the morning and say, could you buy this number of shares at this price? And I would put the orders in. And I learned what a VWAP order was. I had never heard what that was before and all that. So that's really how we started. And they've always been available to me. I hope that it's a two-way relationship. I hope I'm able to help them as well and sometimes look at a company or talk to a CEO, especially as now I'm doing some private deals that I've gotten to know some of those companies as well.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I think I'm somewhat unique, at least I hope so for them, in the sense that I think I'm their only non-Australian investor. And because of that, they had to set up a whole bunch of different accounts with regulation here in the US, and I hope they won't be embarrassed to say when we started, I actually had to do the trading for my own account”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, I'll start with no one did the research that they had done on this company, so clearly they do their homework. And that's just a starting point. What really makes them different is who they are as people. They do this not because money management's a very lucrative business. They would do this if they got paid nothing to do it. This is what they love to do. And it's in their DNA. I guess I was quite impressed by that. This was not, well, I would major in political science, but I got a job on Wall Street and it pays well. And so off I went. It's like, this is what they live to do. And then the last thing is I got to know them as people. I mean, they're wonderful people, very strong culture, share a lot of the same values that I have. And I think run their business that way, whether it be how they run their own firm as they grow and how they treat people to some of the companies that they invest in and don't invest in. And I think they see opportunities where there's companies that they will probably this share price will appreciate but aren't companies.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was the other amusing story about, hey, Mish that I'll never forget. I believe they became shareholders at the check sometime in 2009. And the company was sold, it was announced in the spring of 2010. It was announced on a Friday, I believe, and I get a call that Friday afternoon from Hamish. And I'm thinking, you know, he's going to congratulate me. They probably had a 50 plus percent return in less than a year. And he calls me and says, why'd you sell? I said, what? He says, why'd you sell? I said, Hamish, how much money do you make? He says, We're in this for the long run. This wasn't worth our effort. I said, Hamish, it's Saturday morning in Australia. Go watch cartoons. And we had this long conversation about their perspective of where they thought this company was going to go over the next five, ten years and that they had put all this work into it. And while yes, they got a nice return. They had been hoping for many multiples of that over a long time.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every three to six months I would get this note. I'm coming through New York. Would you be prepared to meet with me? And first he'd meet with the CFO. Are you a shareholder? No, and then he talked to me. And then he asked to talk to head of our sales, some of our product people. And that continued. And then the financial crisis happened, our stock price fell, and he became a shareholder. So finally, one time the CFO was thrilled. He says, yes, I'm a shareholder. But again, having talked to so many different investors, whether it be on the roadshow or then after we had them, both my CFO and I would have said they were the most intelligent, thoughtful, well-researched investor we had.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's really what impressed me so much about them. That was my first interaction. We didn't talk for a very long time. He asked me some pretty good questions, but nothing extraordinary. And about, I don't know, three or six months later, I get an email saying, hey, I'm going to be coming through New York if there's any chance you could meet with me. And I said, okay. And he first met with the CFO. And the CFO asked them, are you a shareholder? He said, no. I said, okay, well, you can still meet with Ethan. So I spent some time with him. And he had done incredible research on our company. And in particular around both our clients and then people who weren't clients. So he actually taught me some things. He had done some surveys himself. And that process continued.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And he said, Well, we were really interested in the company. And this was the only time slot they gave us. So that's how I started the conversation. So we spent 45 minutes on the phone in between one driver from one meeting to an airport in Texas.”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I will never forget it. I was on an IPO roadshow for my company Riskmetrics, and you go from meeting to meeting to meeting and you're driving in SUV with four investment bankers, and in between two meetings on the way to one of the airports, I'm told, oh, you've got to call this guy in Australia. Hamish from TDM Growth. I said, all right. And of course, I've done this routine, you know, 25 times. It's the end of the roadshow. And I make this phone call. And finally, I say to him, I said, What time is it there? And he said, oh, it's four in the morning. I said, what are you doing talking to me at four in the morning? Don't you have better things to do like sleep?”
2021-10-14 · Capital Allocators · Hamish Corlett – TDM Growth Partners (Manager Meetings, EP.15) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source