ICYMI – Sen. Hagerty: “Capital Investment Begets Jobs. Jobs Create Economic Opportunity”
Punchbowl News Event Highlighted Private Equity’s Role in Supporting Small Businesses and Medical Technology
The American Investment Council (AIC) recently hosted an event with Punchbowl News to highlight how private equity fuels small businesses and communities across America.
During the conversation, Punchbowl founder Anna Palmer interviewed Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) about how private capital support to small businesses can help promote growth and opportunity, as well as the evolving regulatory environment in Washington D.C. under the Biden Administration. Palmer also spoke with AIC President and CEO Drew Maloney and Mark Blumling, CEO and founder of KKR-backed clinical research company, Headlands Research. This discussion centered around specific examples of how private equity is supporting small businesses and how overactive Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) regulations would cause downstream negative effects on these small business investments. Watch highlights of the event below:
Private Capital Investments in Tennessee
Anna Palmer asked Senator Hagerty about the impacts of the over $10 billion of private capital that was invested into Tennessee and what that meant for the state’s economy, “Capital investment begets jobs. Jobs create economic opportunity for everybody. It’s a positive, virtuous cycle and that economic opportunity solves so many social ills.”
Hagerty on the SEC’s Regulatory Overreach
When asked about whether the SEC’s new more aggressive regulatory posture is overreaching, Senator Hagerty responded, “Without question. What we see in the public markets is regulatory overreach which has pushed more and more capital and more and more companies to be privately funded rather than utilizing the public markets because the cost, the overhang, is so great being in the public arena…Now, in order to address that fact that regulatory overhang and cost have pushed companies into the private sector, now we’re going to go in and make the private sector just as noncompetitive as we did the public sector because we’re going to regulate them the same way we did the public markets. Where’s the capital going to go next? Overseas? I don’t think this is a good thing for America.”
74% of Private Equity Investments Support Small Business
A recent report published by Pitchbook and the American Investment Council showed private equity investments totaled more than $1 trillion in 2021 alone. AIC President and CEO Drew Maloney noted the significance behind this number translates to, “If you look at the footprint of private equity across the country, we have more than 11 million employees that we support. We have more than 30,000 businesses. Last year alone, 74% of our investments went to companies of 500 or smaller and nearly a third went to companies of ten or less employees. The other thing that often gets overlooked is the investment dollars are returned to pension fund retirees across the country and we have some of the best returns for pensioners every year across the country.”
Headlands Research and how Private Equity Helped Create Jobs and Support Clinical Trials
Mark Blumling, the CEO of Headlands Research, a KKR portfolio company. Mark’s story reflects the American dream – and the important role private equity plays in growing businesses and solving problems. In his opening remarks, Mark shared what his company focuses on and how private equity played a critical role in enabling Headlands to scale to its present size “Headlands is a clinical research side organization, so we’re the group that actually does the testing for all pharmaceutical trials, we did all the covid vaccines and our focus is really to move therapeutics along to get approved. We started with 1 person, and we now have 15 sites across the U.S. and Canada, and we continue to grow. Private Equity has been really instrumental in that, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it otherwise.”
How Private Equity Helps Support More Diverse Clinical Trials
Mark stressed the importance of having diverse and representative populations when clinical trials are being conducted, “We have a strong focus on diversity population for clinical trials we think it’s really important and it’s been important to us since day 1. So, we’ll start sites in areas that don’t have clinical trials, and currently 5% of the population that could participate does, so we’re hoping to increase that for the benefit anyone from a therapeutic perspective as we move forward.”
Click here to watch the full interview.
