Last week we held our monthly National Funding Association meeting in Raleigh. Our guest speaker was Bill Hobbs, Managing Partner of Carousel Capital. Carousel is a buyout fund purchasing companies with at least $3 million of EBITDA located in the Southeast US. In addition to the industry trends and observations, Bill highlighted a phenomenon somewhat unique to our times; we’ve seen the same. That is, valuations for well run and good performing middle-market companies are strong and funding is available. Otherwise, valuations are depressed and deals tough to do …in many cases there’s no deal to be done. This makes sense given the back-drop of historically high dry powder in the coffer’s of private equity funds searching for deals to invest in. In fact, there is the greatest amount of overhang and pent-up capital ever for middle-market transactions.
