PEGCC President & CEO in Washington Post Q&A
PEGCC’s Private Equity at Work campaign was featured in The Washington Post article, “Romney’s run motivates group to defend private equity’s image,” by Danielle Douglas:
Since February, the group has run a multimillion dollar campaign promoting private equity through advertising, cable news shows and its newly launched Web site.
Capital Business recently caught up with council president and chief executive Steve Judge to learn more about the campaign.
When did the council first discuss launching a campaign?
We started planning for how to be an active participant in the public dialogue last fall. We were ready to launch it in February, a little earlier than we thought because the public debate was accelerated in the Republican primaries. We anticipated it would be a little later in the year.
The challenge for us is that people don’t know a lot about private equity, so we have to fill that information void with really good concrete examples of private equity success. And that is where our new Web site comes in.
Can you give me an example of a private equity firm success?
We have six videos on our Web site highlighting several case studies. One of those videos highlights AxleTech, which is a regional manufacturer in Michigan of automobile parts. Under ownership by Carlyle Group for three years, they grew to be the largest supplier of axles to the military. They doubled their employment and sales, and were successfully sold to another company.
Another helpful part of the Web site is a white board video that really describes the private equity business model. It talks about how the purpose of private equity is to strengthen the companies that we own. We do that by trying to drive economic growth in companies that are poised to expand to the next level, or companies in need of a turnaround. The result is that investors, which are pension funds, endowments or other institutional investors, get superior returns from that effort.
To read the full article, click here.
